Innovations in End-of-Life Care
an international journal of leaders in end-of-life care

Apple Tree

Douglas Bishop

[Citation: Bishop D. Apple tree. Innovations in End-of-Life Care. 2001;3(2), www.edc.org/lastacts].

The year my father died was the year the apple tree finally fruited.

Planting it, almost ten years before, was an example of my father's role as peacemaker in our family. I was always seen as the radical tree-hugger, leading to interminable arguments whenever someone decided to cut down a tree, so when the old white pine fell over on its own and I suggested planting an apple tree in its place, he was quick to endorse the idea. He took me to the local nursery and we picked out a dwarf apple tree, which the nurseryman said should fruit in three to five years.

The long gestation of his cancer began at about the same time -- even as he was retiring from his profession of thirty-seven years. Immediately, he started to travel and play tennis more regularly. He bought a new computer and learned to do his taxes and finances there, as well as eventually hooking into the Internet and e-mail. He also began to study Spanish, and I took up the language with him. We went to Mexico together for a short vacation -- just the two of us. On that trip and in the time afterward, I began to get to know my father in a way I never had before. The night after the day we planted the apple tree together, I was lying in bed, feeling satisfied with the work we had done, and I began to think back to my childhood, trying to remember times with my father. It was difficult to remember any specific incidents with him, even through all the years we had lived together. I made a decision then to reach out to him, and the trip to Mexico was part of that. I wanted to get to know him in a new way, but the years of distance were still strong. The trip to Mexico was like opening a window through which I could call to him. He would sometimes show his face at the window, but often he was more comfortable with talking into the air, in a dreamlike way, where we could hear, but not see each other. Then it became easier to talk about the little things that were passing in each of our lives.

Each year, I came back in the winter to prune, watching it grow to a mid-sized tree. But it never had blossoms, never bore fruit. After six years, seven years, eight years, I was starting to think that something was wrong. I suggested to my father that we go back to the nursery and ask the owner about the tree. Maybe there was something that we could do for it -- or not do to it. My father was interested; he thought it was a good idea.

But by then the cancer had spread to his lymph system and he was having trouble walking. I remember the last time I went with him on his morning constitutional up the steep dirt road to the crest of the hill. He was clearly struggling, even with his cane in one hand and me on the other arm. I asked him if he wanted to stop, to rest or even turn around and go back, but he insisted on completing the walk. He made it to the top of the hill, but on the way back down, on the curve by the white garage, his legs began to go out from under him, and I had to half carry him the rest of the way. Even then, he didn't want to stop. I suggested sitting down, but he wouldn't hear of it. We got back to the house with my arm around his waist, him walking bow-legged forward. We made enough of a scene that my mother came out of the house to see what was wrong. His answer was the usual: "I'm OK." My mother and I half carried him into the house and got him sitting puffing at the breakfast table. In that context, we never got around to doing anything about the apple tree.

By the time the blossoms came on the tree, we knew that he wasn't going to last very long. He went through another round of radiation treatments to try to ease the stiffness in his leg, but it didn't really show any result. The summer the first green apples appeared on the tree was when the doctor stopped all chemotherapy because everything had been tried. When he finally left the family property in Vermont for his retirement home in Florida, with both my brothers serving as nurses and a bed set up in a rented van for the journey, there were about twenty apples on the tree. The apples were sweet but a little soft, rose and gold streaking across the skin, but we were all too busy to harvest them as we rushed around to get him ready for the long trip south which everyone knew would be his last, even though no one could really say it. In the end, the apples fell on the ground, maybe left for a nervous deer in the late November gray.

Sometimes it takes that long for a life to find fruition. It's not only the great ones that struggle with their posterity -- sometimes simpler lives struggle for an ending -- like my father, who fought in a world war and emigrated from one country to another, who wrote one book and fathered three sons, who enjoyed a rural childhood and a prosperous old age, but never really felt accomplished. Maybe that's why he fought the cancer for so long. He must have been waiting for something tangible, like a final piece of new fruit falling on frosted grass.

© 2001 Apple Tree by Douglas Bishop. Published here with permission.