In my Montana backyard stands an ancient cluster of pine trees, each over a hundred years old.
I often ponder the stories they could tell, having endured countless cycles of harsh droughts, biting cold snaps, fierce winter storms, and the looming threat of wildfires. These trees have silently observed the birth and growth of a nearby city, witnessing more than a century’s worth of seasons come and go.
However, just before the latest season’s end, one of these venerable pines made a dramatic exit by crashing into part of our house. This event seemed almost symbolic of the tumultuous nature of 2025 globally, and perhaps signaled a significant shift in my own life’s journey.
A decade ago on New Year’s Day, mere hours after my wife passed away, I awoke to an overwhelming emptiness, uncertain of how I would continue. I forced myself to move through the stifling heaviness of that room, unaware then of how deeply grief would root itself, bringing further sorrow to both myself and others.
If allowed, loss can resemble a contagion; it doesn’t just affect you, but can impact those around you, altering their lives much like ripples spreading across a pond.
Our family’s sorrow was a complex tapestry of tragedy, leaving some in disbelief. Diana was taken by brain tumors at the height of her life, a diagnosis that came just a year after we learned our four-year-old daughter, Neva, had a rare brain tumor herself.
Among a blur of gutting moments, a tiny girl battling her own cancer asking if she gave the tumors to her mother will always stick out.
‘No,’ I told her, ‘it doesn’t work that way,’ as my insides threatened to explode.
Diana (right) and Neva (left) were both diagnosed with brain tumors
‘Among a blur of gutting moments, a tiny girl battling her own cancer asking if she gave the tumors to her mother will always stick out,’ says her father, Alan
In time, I learned that the only way to arrest the waves of despair and loss was to meet them head on. That brings new forms of necessary pain: acceptance of choices you regret, coming to grips with the steps required to change your path, letting grief truly take hold so that it can move through you.
Of course, had Diana been around to counsel me, she probably would have shaken her head, busted out her giant grin and simply said: ‘Maybe you should just suck less.’
Eventually, part of my head-on approach came to include going out alone each New Year’s Eve to sit beneath the stars and try to feel her there. I did so again this year, but knew it would be different. Because while people’s better angels seemed to vanish again and again in 2025, the year also brought my daughter and me long elusive forms of peace and joy.
A 16-year-old Neva was declared cancer free. These days, she drives herself and her friends around town with delightful teenage normalcy. And over the last couple years, the loving next chapter Diana so badly wanted for each of us has become deep and real.
My fiancée Elizabeth and I talk of her often. Of how we each sometimes feel that she pulled the strings to bring us together, of how she’d probably laugh at all the difficulties thrown our way and say that suffering is good for our souls, of how Neva is her mother’s astonishing doppelganger.
Diana is part of our building family with a sweetness and presence I never thought possible on that crushing morning ten years ago.
She died late in the morning, and at the same moment on this New Year’s Eve, I sat quietly before the destruction of the fallen tree.
My eyes drifted across jagged timbers and protruding nails, a roof on the verge of collapse, a scattering of ruined possessions – all of it appearing as though some mythical giant had swatted away a portion of our lives.
Just before New Years, a giant tree demolished a portion of the family home
Alan and his fiancée Elizabeth – they talk about Diana often
But as I looked at the mess, I felt unexpected peace and a wave of gratitude. And I felt a pull to hike up somewhere high beneath the stars once darkness arrived, have the frigid air enter my bones, and let both the pain and the beauty of the past year take hold however they might.
I can’t explain it, but I had a sense that something would happen. And it did.
A few hours later, I set out in 12-degree air and headed for a distant ridgeline that bisected a moonlit sky.
When I reached the top, I took off my coat and hat and gloves, leaned against a nearby fence post and began to truly feel the cold of the night. I looked up at the stars for a bit, and as I have done in prior years, I said hello to her and told her a little of our lives.
Then I turned my attention to another old tree that stood just beyond the fence, its form silhouetted by the city lights far below. As I did so, a fox emerged from the tree’s shadow and began to walk slowly in my direction.
It reached the fence only a few feet away, ducked beneath the wires, and then sat on the trail for a few seconds.
It twitched its tail and cocked its head to one side as it took me in. Then it stood and shook itself like a dog before walking away, unhurried, still visible against the kindled snow for a long time.
When it finally disappeared, I realized I’d been holding my breath.
An old tree was silhouetted by the city lights far below, when a fox emerged from the shadow
Neva is now 16 and cancer free – a ‘normal teenager’
The author is a scientist, which means he’s often a skeptic – yet over the last ten years he’s experienced phenomena he can’t explain (photographed with Neva)
I’m a scientist, by both training and nature. Which means I’m often a skeptic, and that I haven’t spent much of my life believing in things that are beyond our earthly plane.
But the last ten years have brought the occasional transcendent moment I can’t explain. And as the infernos of grief lessened, I realized they forged something in me that is both welcomed and new. A desire to seek out moments like that night, and to rest easy in not knowing how they could possibly occur.
That tree could have concealed any number of animals. I’ve seen owls and eagles and hawks on that ridge. Coyotes, deer, elk, even a bear. But until that night, never a fox, let alone one that made me hold my breath.
Because you see, while Elizabeth loves all animals to an almost comical degree, one still takes the top spot. The fox.
As she said when I returned home, maybe the one on the ridge came out just to say that everything is as it should be. Or maybe, she wondered, Diana has been her fox friend all along.
Maybe both are true.
Alan Townsend’s book, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist’s Path from Grief to Wonder, is published by Grand Central
