When my friend Mitch gave me a lucky bamboo plant in a deep-green pottery bowl with three pencil-size stalks braided together, we decided to place the plant in the living room window across from the couch where I spent much of each day.
I smiled when I looked over the rim of the mug of coffee Hannah brought me each morning.
I told Hannah I wanted to care for the plant myself. When it didn’t immediately turn yellow or brown or lose all of its leaves, I was pleasantly surprised.
Tending to the plant gave me a sense of accomplishment at a time when I sometimes felt useless. Glioblastoma limited my ability to walk, and the treatment left me fatigued, making it hard for me to accomplish everyday tasks.
As a physician, I was used to being the one who provided care, not the one who received it. Since my diagnosis in August 2018, far too often, it seemed, I had to rely on help from other people. The enormous change left me feeling adrift and unsettled. Watering the bamboo, as small an act as it was, connected me to a core part of my old identity and taught me I could still be a caregiver. Plants and people could still depend on me.
Over the next few months, I recovered from surgery and completed radiation and the first round of chemotherapy. Even after I returned to work, I continued to care for the plant. Soon, it had nearly doubled in height and its leaves were shiny and lush. Both the tree and I were thriving.
Then, mysteriously, it began to show signs of stress. I increased my watering, then decreased it. I nestled coffee grounds into the soil. I fed it commercial plant food. No matter what I did, the leaves kept browning and dropping to the floor. I grew more and more frustrated and uneasy.
“I can’t even care for a simple plant!” I yelled. “I’m failing!”
Hannah reminded me that we’d seen houseplants die before. She asked me why I was getting so worked up about this particular one.
“If my lucky bamboo dies,” I blurted out, “I might die, too!”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that the plant had become a symbol of my own precarious health.
Identifying with the green and growing plant had offered me solace. Now that the tree was struggling, I felt increasingly fearful. Its shriveling leaves, I worried, might signal the recurrence of my brain tumor.
I realized I had wrongly connected my careful nurturing of the plant — something over which I had at least some control — with my own survival — something over which I had no control.
When my tumor inevitably returned, it would not be because of any failure on my part — not because I didn’t atomize essential oils in my office, not because I ate sugar occasionally and certainly not because I failed to keep this plant alive.
As my anxiety lessened, I began to pore over online tutorials to help me figure out how to care for my bamboo. Following the instructions, I transplanted the tree to a larger pot, untangling its roots to give it room to grow. When it was back in the sunny window, we both began to thrive again.
Whenever I look at the tree with its braided stalks in its new pot, I make a point to think of Mitch and the other people who have cared for and supported me. If the lucky bamboo outlives me, I hope it will comfort Hannah and remind her that our large community will continue to nurture her after I am gone.
David Meyers is a family physician and a health policy researcher in the D.C. area living with terminal cancer. Currently receiving additional treatment for disease progression, he is writing a memoir with his wife, Hannah Joyner.