Growing Roots

The simple, lined index card looked brittle with age, a relic kept tucked in the corner of my bedroom. On it, in my grandmother's elegant, slightly shaky cursive, I read something she’d written not long before she passed away: "When all else fails, embrace hope."

I first read that card shortly after receiving the horrendous diagnosis that changed my life. Doctors gave me only a short time to live. Those words, delivered in a quiet room under the sterile fluorescent lights, cracked the foundation of my life. The fear wasn't just cold; it became a living, smothering weight that choked the air from my lungs. Yet, I decided to fight cancer anyway, driven by the need to see my children grow up, find their dream jobs, maybe even witness their own love stories. I've even dared to dream about growing old with my husband, rocking on the porch with him and simply enjoying his presence. But with every grueling treatment, every scan, and each new symptom, the bright, insistent light of hope steadily faded, until I accepted what several doctors said: “This was terminal.”

During the peak of that emotional slump, my husband decided to do something fun to try taking my mind off of things. He meticulously cleaned an avocado pit, stuck three wooden toothpicks into its equator, and nestled it halfway into a clear glass of water. After all of this, he set it on the sunny kitchen windowsill, where the morning light hit it perfectly.

I didn’t understand how any of this would distract me or make me feel better. So, one morning, I finally said, "Nothing is happening.” I’d spent a month, watching as the pit just sat there..

My husband merely smiled, stirring his coffee with an infuriatingly—and yet, completely darling—calmness. “Patience,” he told me. “One day, you’ll just see it start growing roots. The growth happens where you can’t see it.”

His attitude, so steady and unwavering, felt both comforting and irritating. I had tried to embrace patience with every scan, treatment, step forward, and setback. But it still seemed like everything —eating, walking, staying awake—became a desperate, visible battle.

So, the pit continued to sit there for months. The water grew cloudy. Then, after what felt like an eternity, the pit began to change, but not in the way we hoped. It cracked, and a dark, jagged fissure appeared. Then, from the bottom, something pale and fuzzy began to emerge. It looked less like the beginning of life and more like decay—a white piece of mold. A cold shiver ran down my spine. The pit, once a small, silly idea, suddenly felt like a mirror to my own struggle, a visual representation of fighting without any discernible progress.

I had just scheduled another round of out-of-state treatments, a journey that always leaves me feeling exhausted, and the MRI scan loomed nearby too. I decided the pit’s time was up. I wouldn't waste space letting something decay on our counter. I’d throw it away after I got back from the clinic, but somehow that made me feel like I'd begun giving up on hope.

The MRI—something I still struggle with because of claustrophobia—ended quickly, and then all we could do was wait. I dreaded meeting with my oncologist; the usual news always seemed the same: “Melanoma would kill me.” But today, his words were much different, gentle, almost hesitant, as if he himself couldn't quite believe the report in himself.

“Well,” he said, shuffling uncomfortably, “it looks like the cancer treatments are finally starting to work. There’s been significant reduction, and some of the cancer is gone.”

His voice came toward me in a fog, and I suddenly thought about the horrific treatments—the cycles of nausea, the deep bone-aching fatigue, the feverish nights—these same treatments were finally breaking through the barrier of the disease, giving me a chance, an unexpected and precious gift of more time with my family.

I drove home in a daze, the weight that had pressed on my chest for years, lifting. Later that night, when I walked into the kitchen, I got ready to throw the avocado away.

But as I looked at the pit, I didn't see decay; I saw new life. I realized with a sudden, profound shock that the white, fuzzy thing growing on the bottom wasn't mold. It was a root—and not just one root, but two. They stretched together, the newly emerged one, growing deep and resolute from the very fissure that I had thought signified something bad. These roots were thick, tenacious, and determined to plunge far into the water with unyielding determination.

In that single, sunlit moment, my two worlds converged. The cracked, seemingly stagnant avocado pit felt exactly like my own fight. At my darkest point, when I had battled sepsis and felt close to cracking, to giving up entirely, I had no idea that my body had been secretly responding to the treatments. And that's when I finally understood hope, not as a quick fix or a sudden burst of success, but as a daily choice. Hope really is a tough thing to hold onto, but if you are brave enough to face things head-on, it makes things so much easier.