When I was a child I used to spend hours looking up at the sky through the blossoming branches of the cherry blossom tree that grew in my front yard. I was in awe of its beauty. I thought that was what people meant when they said that heaven was too beautiful for humans to comprehend. When the tree started dying, losing branches and furling inward like a rotting leaf, it wasn't just the death of a tree, it was the death of an architectural element of my childhood.