I Didn’t Know How To Help My Friend Dying Of Cancer, So I Taught Her Son To Garden. Here’s Why.
N.J.’s eyes are dark and deep as he kneels in the garden, hands wrapped gently around the kale seedling. We line peas on either side of the fencing I’ve brought, and I show him how to press each one down to the first knuckle on his index finger and then pat the soft dirt over the hole. The tomato plant doesn’t want to come out of the container; it’s root-bound, clinging to the pot; I tap the edges to loosen it and pull slowly on the stem. “Plants are tough,“ I say, as I slice the roots with the edge of the trowel and then let him do the same thing to the other side. We wiggle the tangly, knotted white roots loose, and then he sets it in the hole we dug, snuggling it in and combing the soil with his fingers. Finally, we dot the front of the box with onion starts and poke them in, some of them already sprouting little green shoots from their tops.
It is May; we are working together in a garden box his parents built in their backyard the previous summer. All the seeds they planted then washed away in a hard rain and they hadn’t had time to do any more with it, because Mary, N.J.’s mother, was undergoing chemotherapy after a diagnosis of Stage IV colon cancer. Now, a year later, treatment has ended, and Mary is in her last days. She won’t get to see her son in his garden, though she is only steps away. Breathing slowly and steadily, nodding and smiling softly—these are the things she is doing with the energy she has left. She looks at pictures, though, on my phone, of N.J. with his hands on his plants, proudly shepherding his garden along, smiling her same soft smile. His eyes are her eyes.
Before Mary was diagnosed, we were friends, but not close friends. We lived down the road, attended the same church, chatted here and there in passing. I have two girls; she had two boys. She would bring N.J. and his older brother to play as soon as N.J. could walk on his own; he would toddle through the rows of my garden, stuffing cherry tomatoes into his cheeks, tugging on fat pea pods,…
