For 17 years the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden on Bolton Road has been a sanctuary for cancer patients, survivors, and their families, offering support and therapies. On Sunday, October 1, a dedicated team, led by Healing Garden co-founders Bill Thurston and Betsy Tyson Smith, will host the Perennial Walk and Ride to Thrive, an ambitious fundraiser with a goal of $75,000. The proceeds will support the work of the Healing Garden and its growing number of clients—a 78 percent increase in referrals over the past five years.
Bill Thurston and Betsy Tyson Smith, co-founders of the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden, are awarded Nonprofit of the Year by the Middlesex West Chamber of Commerce on Jan. 20, 2017. (Courtesy photos)
Events on Oct. 1, celebrating life and healing, will be a 66-mile bike ride of Century Riders, leaving from the Healing Garden at 8 a.m., and Half-Century Riders setting out at 10 a.m. for 33 miles through the hills and towns of the Nashoba Valley. Those walking a route will leave at noon; families and dogs on leash are welcome. During a recent interview with the Press, Executive Director Margaret Koch told Thurston that she has arranged for him and Tyson Smith, as the event co-chairs, to ride in a black Saab that day, to which Thurston cracked, “Oh, a Saab story, eh?”
Following the ride and walk events, participants are invited to a celebration, which will include food and drink, drumming, face-painting, pumpkin decoration, and a big-screen projection of the Patriots home game. Leigh Carpenter, director of development, said that she sees the inclusion of the football game as actually “philosophical,” explaining that the Healing Garden is all about helping people find moments of joy and ordinariness in lives filled with cancer, and not letting the disease define them.
The Healing Garden offers a community of people who immediately understand each other. Carpenter told of overhearing a man and woman waiting for services who struck up an immediate rapport, laughing with each other about the well-intentioned but misguided things people say because they don’t “get it.” Obviously, Bill Thurston “got it” during the time his wife Ginny had cancer and found solace in her home’s beautiful setting. Upon her death, Bill offered a rental cottage on the property as office space for the support group to which Ginny had belonged, run by Tyson Smith, herself a cancer survivor. Since then he has given additional acreage and continued support, even during his more than 10 years in California, from which he returned to this area last January. His generosity of heart has been matched by his generosity of pocket.
A history of service
Thurston’s generosity has not been limited to the Healing Garden. During his long residence in Harvard, he also gave of his money, time, and energy to several town committees and projects. He reminisced about serving as recording secretary of the Educational Study Committee in the 1950s, charged with exploring regionalization for Bromfield, and later being appointed chairman of the building committee for the “new” Bromfield School, working with the press, soliciting public input, and securing a grant to bring two architects from the Ford Foundation to Harvard as consultants. He was a founder of the Harvard Schools Trust and of Celebration.
Koch said the entire budget of the Healing Garden depends on philanthropy. The expansion of the original cottage to the beautiful facility of today and the more recent creation of a sensory garden and water feature outside the garden room were accomplished through donations and volunteers. Koch reflected that many of the early supporters of the Healing Garden have since died, and that the initial excitement of townspeople 17 years ago over “this new and wonderful place” has subsided. She and Carpenter hope today’s younger generations will pick up the philanthropic baton that Bill Thurston and others carried.
As it has from the beginning, the cancer center accepts clients from all socioeconomic groups and charges on a sliding scale, offering some services pro bono. The Healing Garden, founded in memory of Bill’s wife Ginny, was originally for women with breast cancer, but it now welcomes clients of both genders afflicted with any form of the disease. Some cancer patients have access to wellness facilities connected with the hospital where they are being treated, but for those who don’t, the Healing Garden is a sanctuary. Koch said, “Some of the most vulnerable people are being referred here, and we help. But that help depends on whether the community can support us.” She went on to say that it’s not the big donors that make things possible; it’s the average family with an average donation year after year that makes the difference.
Rising demand ahead
Koch said she worries about money particularly now because of what she sees will be an increased demand for services as many baby boomers face some form of cancer. Financial support is necessary to provide them with complementary therapies to enhance their quality of life as they go through what may be long periods in treatment.
Society’s knowledge of cancer has changed a great deal, Koch said. “Rather than the goal being to cure or treat the disease, we now know it is just as important to provide palliative care all the way along, to help the patient with quality of life.” Koch talked about how people need to educate themselves on the resources available to help them live with the disease. Medical treatment has improved and so people are living longer with the illness. But understanding the importance of a holistic approach to health and wellness has lagged.
From left: Greg Knoettner and Skyler, Marcie, Phyllis, and Dick Clawson ride as Team Chrissy in the 2015 inaugural Ride to Thrive in loving memory of Chrissy Clawson Audibert.
Koch said that what Ginny Thurston intuited, that immersion in nature can have healing powers, is now proven by research and documentation. The Healing Garden’s original woodlands, lovely shrub and perennial gardens rolling down the hillside, and koi pond, along with the newer sensory garden, offer clients a place to slow down and find much-needed peace and quiet.
Combatting stress
Stress definitely exacerbates the effects of cancer, said Koch, and she believes society’s level of stress is the highest it’s ever been: “With constant stimuli, our bodies are like a sports car with its engine constantly being revved.” Therapies such as meditation, acupuncture, yoga, and massage help to calm the body. Carpenter said more than one client has told her that acupuncture “changed my life.” Koch said there is increasing interest in the U.S. in a practice started a decade ago in Japan, shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, which has shown to have physiologically positive results.
Koch talked about the new directions the Healing Garden has taken in the past few years.
Realizing that they were missing people who couldn’t come during the day, Koch expanded the center’s hours to include one evening a week. The Healing Garden also offers a weekend retreat four times a year for patients and caretakers. It is a focused day for meeting other people, learning about services, and participating in therapies.
The Healing Garden is partnering with individuals and businesses to offer “wraparound care” of support and therapy, said Koch. Often the first thing a person with a cancer diagnosis needs is help with a financial crisis. The center also helps clients connect to housing, food, and camps for kids. The Community Harvest Project donates food to the Healing Garden, and dietitians teach clients how to use the food. Coordinators from the YMCA’s Livestrong program have come to the Healing Garden for training in understanding the emotional side of cancer to better help people in the exercise program.
In talking more about collaboration and fundraising, Koch likened the generosity and goodwill of people to a pebble thrown into a pond. The circle of effect keeps getting bigger, she said. For the Healing Garden, it was Bill Thurston who threw the first pebble. In acknowledgement of his role, Thurston quoted from “The Little Prince” what seems to be an axiom for his own life: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
