A Dying Man's Gift to His Wife – His Artificial Lawn

Our stories make us unique, and listening to and hearing what a patient tells us is at the heart of the art of medicine and other healthcare services. If we are open to hearing with our hearts, every story can teach us something new. We wanted to share the account by the University of Oxford's Professor of Medical Oncology, Dr. David Kerr, who describes a conversation with a patient in a video, in Dr. Kerr's own words in written form.

This patient has advanced metastatic colorectal cancer and is a patient I have cared for over many years, in many ways a mainstay of our clinic. But he is entering that final circuit, that final lap; conventional treatment has now failed. He is no longer interested in other experimental treatments or entering clinical trials, and he is currently very comfortable. He has a good performance status and manages most things, albeit at a relatively low level, and he has a good quality of life.

Today we had the most extraordinary conversation about his garden, of which he is very proud. Throughout all the years he has been a patient in my care, this has been a recurring topic of conversation: How is the garden? We talk about the changing seasons and the religious understanding that there is a time for everything – seasons for all people, we might say.

Now he has done the most remarkable thing with this garden. He realized that he had months to live, and to prepare for the care of the garden he dug up his beloved lawn. For those of you who are not from the United Kingdom, there is something about lawns that is particularly relevant and important to an English gentleman of a certain age. Anyway, he dug up the lawn and replaced it with a kind of AstroTurf (a type of artificial grass). What an extraordinary thing to do.

He has tended this lawn for years and probably showed his garden more love than he did his family. I am quoting his own words now, rather than guessing. And he took this final step as a way of making the large garden more manageable for his wife when he is gone. Perhaps there is something about the unchanging, eternal nature of artificial grass. So he was waxing lyrical about this and how it would make life easier for his wife.

"But did your wife not have something to say about this?" I asked.

Perhaps she would have thought of him every time she cut the grass. Perhaps the living lawn could have been a lasting memory of who he was and what he did. But no, no, they both decided that they wanted something effective and easy to maintain, yet in some ways longer-lasting; we return to the feelings of these eternal memories, and so it goes.

This conversation with my patient made me smile: the possibility of giving up something he loved, his living lawn, as an act of love. In a way, this is a kind of tribute or memorial to him – not a gravestone, not a statue, an elaborate Christian cross or a symbol of another religion we might follow, but rather the unchanging simplicity of an artificial lawn. It summed up him and his love for his wife.

I wonder what you would do? What do you want to leave of yourself? What lasting symbols of remembrance would you want to leave for your spouse, your family and your loved ones? Perhaps Steve's story of his artificial lawn might prompt you, as it did me, to ask yourself these questions.