V's Version

Dear E - I am so sorry that I haven't written back sooner. I was so glad to hear from you. I've been ill this week but pushing through to be the busy mother and crazy quilter that I am. Emails have fallen through the cracks.

I don't even know where to start...

... maybe the garden is the place to start my story. It was 1997 in New England when last you heard of me. I had been married for 6 years and was managing a bead store while continuing to restore antique quilts. We were lucky enough to live in a duplex with a gardener who taught me a lot about vegetables and flowers and seedlings and patience. Her name was Colleen and she took pictures of me throughout my labor when the rhododendrons and lilacs were in full bloom. Pk was born in May.

When our son was four months old, we moved to Albany, New York so that my partner could take a temporary position at a church. We moved into a huge pre-Civil War farmhouse that came with a century-old tulip and rare bulb garden. We moved in when the quarter-acre vegetable garden was at peak harvest. It was all I could do to put up hundreds of those tomatoes. And even though I made quarts of pureed sauce, the pear tree remained heavy with fruit well into winter. I later took that sauce from the freezer in my first attempts at introducing solid food to Pk, who refused it. He ended up nursing for four and a half years! But I get ahead of myself.

When it was time to leave the New York post in 1998, we smuggled many of the bulbs from the old garden (which was being plowed under to put in a new septic system). As you may know, it is illegal to bring fruit or plants into the state of California. When the Agricultural Checkpoint Officer asked if we had anything to declare, I offered the red herring of an orange bought somewhere in Nevada. I neglected to tell him about the daffodils stashewd in the cooler.

Our California home was a block from the beach in a town called Aptos, just south of Santa Cruz. I had a lot to learn about California gardening. Fog, although dreary sometimes, is a friend to the garden. The concept of “drought-tolerant“ was learned the hard way as I watched trees and shrubs die under my New England watering habits. And the first time I actually saw a gopher take an entire patch of flowers down into its tunnel, I could hardly believe my eyes. I thought that was just for the movies!

The first four years there were really just full of gardening experiments: how much sun does lavender need to get really huge? What flowers in the middle of winter? What eats aphids off the lemon tree? Is there ever a natural solution for slugs and snails that doesn’t include beer? I had three kinds of berries, table grapes, lemons, peas, carrots, really tall corn stalks and lots of flowers. I couldn’t get too ambitious, though. I was so busy with the baby and with being a church youth group leader and a quilter and the minister’s wife. To my great joy, the smuggled daffodils came up year after year.

All gardening came to a screeching halt in the harvest of 2002. The inexplicable lesions in my mouth and eyes lead to tests that ultimately showed that I had both cancer in my abdomen and a rare allergic reaction to it. As I lay helpless and burning (my skin was coming unglued) on the couch, I stared blankly through the pain meds into our front garden. The picture window framed the slow motion crawl of weeds and bolting flowers. I could only watch with regret and frustration.

In the aftermath of the surprise announcement notifying me of the end of my marriage, there was chaos. Good friends and church folks helped me pick up the pieces. My house was packed around me, things got sold, things got lost and there are things that I have just blocked out. But I remember clearly asking repeatedly (almost desperately) if someone could please, please dig up the daffodils. In the winter of 2003, I stood in the yard in my pink pajamas, pointing to the places where I knew the bulbs were hidden. I remember being overwhelmed at what to do with them all– so vulnerable and exposed and up-rooted. I put them in paper grocery bags and hoped they would weather the transplanting.

I remember being overwhelmed at what to do with them all– so vulnerable and exposed and up-rooted.

I was too sick to transplant anything that spring. I had no idea where the paper bags were and any thought of gardening gave way to mere survival. I had reluctantly begun my second round of chemo. It was the week before both my son’s 7th birthday and our 20th class reunion (did you go?) I had a dangerous infection in my port-a-catheter and a very high temperature and not much fight left in me. When I left the hospital, I was given an estimate of three days before I would slip into a coma and die so I tried to say goodbye to my family and friends who gathered from afar. Except for Pk’s sake, I was not afraid. I was weary. Very weary.

In the same way that some plants make it even when every leaf and branch looks dead, I made it. We will never know exactly why. All I know is that my family brought me back to New England and the bulbs traveled back too, driven by my youngest sister (Kathleen) in the back of my Ford Escort wagon. Because I did not want to be in Maine (as grateful as I was for my sister Jennifer’s generous offer) and because I could not even consistently dress myself, let alone dig in the dirt, there was no planting, no garden at all. Well, there was the lush vegetable garden of my good friends Scout and Susana. I stayed there for part of the summer as they invited Pk and me into their own brood. Miss Susana would bring vegetables that I had never eaten and make food even I could eat. After two years of mouth lesions and vomiting, I had lost half of my body weight so eating anything – especially delicious home-grown vegetables – was a rare event.

When I was strong enough to act on my gutsy Molly Brown-instinct, I moved back to California. My son and I glided through airport security checkpoints in a wheelchair while the bulbs lay hidden in the Ford Escort among my life’s possessions as our friend Brook brought them back on their third cross-country trek.

I landed just north of Santa Cruz in the sunny mountain home of a friend where we found that our roommate situation was mutually advantageous. Our families blended together very well and there was a whole lot of laughter. Aaron and I called each other the Q.S. Twins – separated at birth in different states. The Q. and S. could stand for quiet and shy (not!), quick and sarcastic, queer and straight. I was definitely getting stronger, regaining a sense of humor. If it weren’t for the fact that I was going blind, I probably would have managed to get the bulbs in for the fall season. Still on a break from the chemo, I was able to eat and regain some muscle but the glands that produce lubricating tears in both of my eyes had disintegrated. I could no longer keep my eyes open longer than it took to get a quick snapshot and every moment was hideously painful.

Pain does funny things. For me, it makes me stronger. Emotional pain has shown me that I am hearty and can withstand killing frosts. Physical pain has made me spread out roots. We are all interconnected and helpless pain just brings that simple fact into the light – like dew on a spider web. I learned how to manage an army of angels who drove me to church and to the doctor’s office, who drove Pk to and from school. People helped with almost every aspect of my life and, in return, I gave them hope. If I could do this – if I could survive all of this – there was hope.

People helped with almost every aspect of my life and, in return, I gave them hope. If I could do this – if I could survive all of this – there was hope.

In the early spring, when others’ daffodils were in bloom, I fell in love. I hadn’t meant to. But spring does that sometimes and love rushed in with the brilliance and warmth of sunshine after an unspeakably difficult winter. I had known Dani for almost ten years but I had no idea that she loved to garden. Throughout the beginning of our courtship, there were many flowers: Cecil Brunner roses from the oncologist’s office where we discussed monogamy, three daffodils on her Buddhist altar to represent the three of us, elegant orchids in her Victorian San Francisco apartment, an arm full of celebratory lilies and roses on the day we got the CT results confirming that the abdominal tumor had shrunk – even without chemo. My conscious plan of using the alternative medicines of love and laughter had paid off!

On the day I flew back from fitting and receiving my new prosthetic lenses from the Boston Foundation for Sight, I brought tulips given to me by Boston friends who wanted to help me with a little scheme. On the plane, I got people in the cabin involved. I told them to look for the woman with spiky brown hair wearing a leaf green shirt and standing next to the baggage claim. “Your friend can’t wait to *see * you,” each person said as they handed Dani the tulips until she stood there with two dozen of them, surprised to see me on the escalator, grinning and gazing at her with my new eyes wide open.

I wanted to see everything, go everywhere. I wanted to quilt and see Pk’s baseball games and volunteer at church and give back to everyone who had helped. I wanted to travel and spend time – precious time that has a completely different depth of meaning for me now –with family and friends. While we were apart during the summer, Dani and I sent cell phone pictures of yellow flowers to each other. Pk and I filled the little antique wagon at our summerhouse in Rhode Island with colorful annuals. It was with great disappointment that I found out and relayed the news that the cancer had spread to my lungs.

In the fall of 2005, we embarked on another round of chemo, as ready as we could be to face the challenges we knew would be there. Our beloved friend Brook came to help Pk when I was too sick to get up. My housemates on the mountain continued to make me laugh while Dani commuted from San Francisco to love and care for me with a green thumb that can make anything grow. She is a nurturer at her core. And in the face of all of it, we dared to dream of a garden. We made pictures in our minds as we chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. The pictures were of a house that could hold all of our love, one where we could laugh and garden and cultivate a family.

In January of 2006, a few weeks after moving in, I found the paper bags of bulbs that had crossed the country three times. Every one of them turned to dust in my hands and I grieved for a life that was gone even at the same time that I rejoiced in one full of happiness. But that is how nature is: things die and compost to make fertile soil for something altogether new.

But that is how nature is: things die and compost to make fertile soil for something altogether new.

And so, now, as I write you, I am looking out onto my garden. Actually, with wireless computers, I often sit there to type. It is full of color and experiments. It benefits from our Team Go-Go efforts: Dani’s lifetime of California gardening and what little that I have learned. We often look at each other – while pruning or watering or handing over a trowel – and our eyes meet in disbelief. How is it that we are so lucky to be in love, to be alive, to be parents of Pk and gardeners together among the roses and rosemary and raspberries, the poppies and pansies and sweet peas? How lucky are we to be quietly enjoying the ancient art of training dichondra around my heart shaped rocks? No one could ever have predicted something like this and yet it is as natural as if it were the plan all along.

Having just finished round four of chemo, I get a CT scan next week. In some ways, it matters. And in others, it doesn’t. All I have is now. All any of us have is now.

I hope this letter finds you well. I would love to hear how yoga has come into your life, how you and T have maintained a relationship for so long, how you came to decide (did you decide?) not to have children. I realize the effort it takes to get into it all – but I too wish for the volley to continue.

With much love, V



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Labels: V journey into blindness chemo hope garden beauty love divorce family lesbian