Three years ago, my sister asked me what type of tree I wanted as a Christmas present. This wasn’t a simple question, like “What kind of sweater: V-neck or crew?” Julie was dying and wanted to give me a living gift to remember her by.
I thought about it for several days, eventually texting back, “A Japanese maple because I love its lacy leaves and the way they come to life in the fall, turning from green to a brilliant red, as though on fire.”
“Like you, sister,” I added. She had also lived a life on fire.
Compared with Julie, an amateur gardener, and my brother Jay, a landscape designer, I’d come up short when it came to anything resembling horticulture. When we were children, our mother planted a maple in our backyard. It proved resilient under the weight of snow or ice, with a propensity to bend rather than break. I liked these attributes, and the metaphor, especially in light of Julie’s cancer prognosis. I hoped my new maple might help me to become flexible rather than broken in the months to come.
A few weeks after our text exchange, I arrived home to find my sister’s gift: a tree on my front porch, just two and a half feet tall, roots wrapped carefully in burlap. She’d also included one of those pop-up cards. When I opened it, a crimson Japanese maple unfurled in all its glory.
In her familiar scrawl, my sister had written:
Dear Steven
I hope the red maple tree gives you years of beauty and happiness.
Whenever you look at this tree, think of me smiling back at you and saying “I love you!”
You are the best #1 brother a kid sister could ever hope for. You’ve loved me, supported me and stood by me all the time. I am forever grateful that you are my brother.
Love,
Julie
Xoxxoxox
Yes, this was much better than a sweater.
The tree looked forlorn, but that was to be expected. By this time of year, the Japanese maple had already shed its leaves. Now dormant, it was prepared to withstand the winter, awaiting a brighter new year.
Jose, who helps me in the garden, planted it in the backyard under the canopy of a towering black walnut tree, which I hoped would protect the sapling.
I counted that Christmas as the fourth since Julie, then 59, had been diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer. Early on, her oncologist had told us we’d be lucky to have five more Decembers together.
The next spring came early to North Carolina, and the awakening maple began to sprout buds, which soon turned into bright green leaves. I could imagine photosynthesis shifting into high gear as the weather warmed and the small maple began its annual work of repair, restoration and growth. Julie, too, seemed to be in decent health, spending much of the spring in her own garden — fertilizing the soil, planting fall bulbs and tending to her beloved hydrangeas.
As for me, the gardening neophyte, I cared for that maple with as much attention as I could muster. By midsummer, I’ll admit, I’d begun to talk with it. I lived 500 miles from Julie, and chatting to the little maple felt like having her beside me, which I knew had been her intent.
“Nothing bad can happen to this tree,” I told my neighbors, Wendy and Charlie.
Labor Day passed with just a hint of the cooler nighttime temperatures that ignite the maple. In late October, the tree lit up, fiery and proud. Julie and I spoke often, almost as frequently as I spoke with the tree. I imagined that the maple could recognize my voice, which would allow Julie and me to use it as our medium — when the time came.
The fifth Christmas came and went. We were in overtime.
With the spring, my other trees — a couple of dogwoods and a pecan — sprouted buds. The Japanese maple, however, appeared inert. I went out to examine it, and snapped off a small branch. It was dry and brittle, which even I knew was not a good sign.
I texted a photograph of the tree to Jose: “This is the Japanese maple in the backyard,” which he surely knew since he’d planted it. “It seems dead. Would you look at it? It’s very important to me.”
When he didn’t reply that day, I sent him the back story, ending with “It can’t die because it will mean Julie will die.” He rushed over the next morning. The prognosis was not good.
As I later learned from an arborist, the maple had succumbed to black walnut toxicity. I hadn’t known that the large tree overhanging it could produce a toxic substance called juglone, concentrated in its buds, nut hulls and roots. Black walnut trees are killers.
By now it was April, the same month Julie’s oncologist told her she’d exhausted all possible treatments.
The oncologist, when pressed, estimated that my sister had two or three months to live. With time running short, I became obsessed with finding another Japanese maple. Miraculously, I discovered a nursery that billed itself as a “Japanese maple tree farm,” only 20 miles from my house. I raced over the next day, and found more than 200 varieties of maples, covering acre upon acre.
The owner recommended a Japanese maple known for its purple leaves that turn bright red in the fall. I paid him $275, and together we put it in the back of my station wagon. Jose and I planted it, this time in the front yard, far away from the reach of the black walnut.
Julie died six weeks later, unaware of the maple tree switcheroo.
The maple has flourished. I say either “hello” or “goodbye” each time I go by. Sometimes I stop and chat. Am I a kook? Perhaps, but I think often of the Mary Oliver poem “When I Am Among the Trees,” which speaks to me the way I speak to Julie through my tree.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
Even in the dead of winter, I look at the tree and think of Julie smiling back at me, saying, as she promised, “I love you.”
The post My Sister Was Dying of Cancer. A Christmas Gift Helped Me Process It. appeared first on New York Times.
