Death of a Hero

Our word hero brings to mind great athletes, soldiers who show courage under fire, champions of social justice. But most of us also know at least one ordinary hero, somebody not well-known, a person who faces extraordinary difficulties with the grace, wit and ingenuity we'd wish to have ourselves under similar circumstances.

We lost one of those everyday heroes when Emily Binger Cooper, age 46, died at her Pembroke home on July 16.

I met Emily four years ago when she invited me to give a talk on vegetable gardening at the new Granite State Independent Living facility in Concord. After my talk, I toured the display of seeds, tools and photographs of her own gardens Emily had set up on tables on one side of the room.

Those photos blew me away (as the gardens themselves would when I visited a year later): I saw a wheelchair ramp designed with extra-wide railings that held planting boxes of seedlings hardening off in the spring sunshine. In later photos, the same planting boxes overflowed with salad greens, herbs and flowers. Other photos showed pole beans and peas climbing riotously up the sides and over the wheelchair ramp's railings so Emily could harvest them from both ground and ramp level without leaving her chair.

I saw pictures of super-high raised planting beds Emily had created so she could tend her root crops by leaning over a moveable homemade brace of bamboo poles and twine. Potatoes growing vertically in homemade wire planting cages. Cucumbers and squashes climbing out of planter boxes up bamboo and plastic netting trellises so Emily could harvest them from a sitting position. Dozens of containerized vegetables plants in Emily's driveway: peppers, okra, summer squash, herbs, flowers and six or eight varieties of heirloom tomatoes. A piece of sloping ground alive with highbush blueberries, kiwi vines, cranberry bushes and more flowers.

One group of photos moved me to tears. They showed Emily harnessed to a red plastic toboggan, crawling on hands and knees to haul carrots, beets and other crops to her house.

In the spring of 2000, we invited Emily to enroll in the UNH Extension Master Gardener program, a 10-week training offered each spring that covers all aspects of home horticulture. In exchange, participants agree to volunteer 45 hours sharing their love of gardening with others.

As her volunteer contribution, Emily delivered a powerful 11-page essay and accompanying slide show entitled By Hook or by Cook: Gardening with Limitations, which dispenses much practical wisdom about overcoming physical challenges. The photos provide a window into just how successfully Emily used the power of green plants to triumph over her progressive illness.

In her essay Emily wrote "Obstacles confound many people, while a lucky few are motivated by the challenges they pose. I believe that the hapless many can join those lucky few, if we learn and practice new skills, even if we feel it goes against nature."

Emily had worked as a hydrogeological engineer until a mysterious condition robbed her of her coordination and balance. No longer able to practice her profession or drive a car, Emily turned to her longtime love of backyard gardening, first to help save money after a drastic drop in income, later as a source of pleasure, deep healing and learning she could pass along to others.

Instead of allowing grief, fear and anger to overwhelm her, Emily used her isolation to generate a strategy for living. "Because it forced me to be resourceful, isolation turned out to be my most valuable ally," she wrote, "though it hardly seemed so at the time. My solitary struggles finally led to the revelation that I never would be able to devise workable adaptations if I didn't first explore some fundamental questions about my needs. After that, things made sense."

Most of us think of our needs in terms of what we lack-our deficiencies-but Emily itemized hers as a series of five action steps to help with what she called "scoping and coping": (1) Define the things that give pleasure. (2) Define the range and scope of capabilities. (3) Organize tasks and work areas as modules. (4) Maximize efficiency. (5) Nurture the philosophy that failure is O.K.

Emily's words about failure bear repeating: "Bitter and plentiful experience has shown me how dangerous it is to let my disappointments and shortcomings degenerate into discouragement and inaction. I've learned that favorable outcomes are possible when I capitalize on unintended consequences and mistakes. In fact, it seems that my most memorable triumphs were also the sweetest because I first tasted failure.

"The value of experiencing failure is under-appreciated in American culture. I have come to believe that the only true failure is failure to persevere, giving up before exhausting all possibility of success.

Emily approached every horticultural challenge with scientific curiosity, conducting many experiments to find more efficient, productive and less expensive ways to garden. For example, she spent years perfecting a process for sterilizing, amending and recycling the potting medium she used for her container crops. She experimented with various schemes for growing potatoes vertically.

Emily lived alone for years with enormous day-to-day uncertainty, never knowing just how or when her disabling condition might progress. In the face of great uncertainty, she learned to avoid self-pity: "When I follow a routine which demands little mental and physical effort, it is all too easy to slip into a negative, self-defeating mindset. Gardening is just one of several activities that I find both demanding and pleasurable. Such activities maintain my sense of well-being and help boost my initiative."

Emily continued pushing back the barriers, adding crops to her garden that few New Hampshire gardeners grow: kiwis, tayberries, garden huckleberries and rattail radishes grown for their succulent seedpods.

Beside gardening and giving presentations about gardening with disabilities, Emily studied classical piano, published newspaper and magazine articles, took a job as a career counselor at Pembroke High School and got elected to the town budget committee and the board of Granite State Independent Living.

Poets and philosophers throughout history have used the garden as a metaphor for the most essential of human work-tending and producing ourselves, our invisible, private parts. Emily lived that metaphor. But she knew that gardeners gain their self-knowledge fiercely and physically, not by mere reflection, but by getting dirt under their fingernails, blisters on their palms and cramps in their backs.

"I want Death to find me planting cabbages in my garden, unafraid of my imminent demise and unconcerned that I will not be able to reap the fruits of my labor," wrote the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Emily would have resonated with those words. I hope she spent some part of her last days with her hands in the dirt and worrying whether her Green Zebras would ripen before early blight defoliated the plants.

"While I truly enjoy the work, I receive a wonderful bonus every time I open my door or look out my windows," Emily wrote. "I celebrate the spectacle that greets me, aware that though Nature and Providence made it all possible, I had a hand in it."

You can read Emily's essay By Hook or by Crook: Gardening with Limitations on our website. Look under the heading Adaptive Gardening: Gardening with Limitations.

Peg Boyles UNH Cooperative Extension Writer/Editor