METHUEN - Brenda Waller never got to build the healing garden she hoped to have in her backyard.
But nearly a year after she lost a decadelong battle with cancer, the late Methuen woman's dream lives on and is gaining momentum as a project that could help many in the Merrimack Valley.
The Trauma Intervention Program of the Merrimack Valley is hosting a 5K Run/Walk in memory of Waller, a longtime TIP volunteer. The event, set for Sunday, Nov. 4 - the first anniversary of Waller's death - will help raise money to create a garden like the one she envisioned.
It won't be in Waller's backyard, but might wind up someplace else in Methuen or another area community as a place of respite for people battling for their lives or trying to recover from tragedy and trauma - and for healers, who need to relieve themselves of the stress.
Waller's daughter, Lindsay Waller, a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit at Mass General Hospital in Boston, said her mom's dream of the healing garden evolved from her chemotherapy treatments there.
During the final months of her life last year, Waller would often find it peaceful to visit the Howard Ulfelder, MD Healing Garden, on the eighth floor of the hospital's Yawkey Center for Outpatient Care. She wanted to use the 6,300-square-foot garden as a model in building something similar in the Valley.
There, she could sit down and enjoy living plants and the sights and sounds of cascading water, in a quiet, serene, outdoor setting - alone, with friends or with other cancer patients and their loved ones.
Her vision was for a healing garden that also would be a place of respite for police officers, firefighters, ambulance crews, emergency room workers and others left behind to comfort and console grieving relatives or traumatized survivors.
"She was so desperate to realize this dream that she wanted to enter a contest to have a healing garden built onto the house in the backyard," Lindsay Waller said last week while working at the TIP office making plans for the upcoming event.
"The healing garden was her first dream, but it was part of a bigger one - a center where you could go to be taken care of. Not just people battling cancer or other tragedies, but people who try to heal others," she said.
Waller enjoyed a career in nursing until the cancer forced her out of the job she loved. She used her nurturing skills when she joined TIP more than a decade ago. Friends and admirers said she had a rare gift for helping to comfort people traumatized by the death of loved ones, yet never let on about the pain and trauma she may have felt from her own fatal disease.
A close friend of Waller's, herself a nurse, recalls a defining moment in the birth of the dream as the two sat in the Boston healing garden.
"Brenda and I were both captivated by this 2-year-old boy who was having a ball with his own reflection in the fountain," said TIP's executive director and founder, Jayan Landry of Andover.
"A little boy who was bald. There was no sadness in his eyes. No crying. He was just looking into the fountain. We were delighted watching him. Then we got thinking, 'Wouldn't it be awesome if we had something like this in our community?'"
That was last October, just a few weeks before Waller died.
Landry was also the one who wrote a letter on Waller's behalf, hoping to win her an Extreme Home Makeover, and that healing garden in her yard. Their entry didn't win.
But other people at TIP felt Waller's dream was a winner anyway, and one worth pursuing.
Last December, Dennis Larocque, whose wife, Katherine, is one of TIP's 27 volunteers, hatched the idea of organizing a road race as a fundraiser to help TIP and honor Waller.
"I had it in the back of mind a few years ago that a race would be good to sponsor and was waiting for the right moment," he said.
Landry says the healing garden isn't necessarily restricted to Methuen, but could go in any one of the area towns where a small chunk of land "that's safe and protected, but easily accessible to the public" is available.
"We need parking. We need handicapped accessibility. We need a water source and a location that's conducive to healing - more in the woods, or in a residential quiet setting," Landry said.
"It's not going to happen tomorrow and it may not happen for five years. It's still kind of a dream, and it will get more clear as the journey goes along," she said.
Landry is looking for others to join the effort, either as sponsors for the upcoming walk, landowners interested in donating a potential site for the garden, or others who have good ideas to advance the dream.
"A healing garden would be the ultimate tribute to Brenda, whose dream is so much about what TIP stands for," Landry said.
"We're trying to create something good from something bad. TIP has always been about resurrection from the ashes."
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Staff writer Mark E. Vogler writes Milling Around each week for the Sunday Eagle-Tribune. He can be reached at 978-946-2291 or mvogler@eagletribune.com.
A Run/Walk For Brenda Waller
Where: Walkers and joggers will meet at the Lawrence Lodge of Elks at 652 Andover St. in Lawrence.
When: 10:45 a.m. on Nov. 4
Cost: The pre-entry fee is $15. Registration on the day of the event is $20. Participants are seeking sponsorship pledges of $25.
To benefit: Proceeds will go toward building a healing center - a dream of the late Brenda Waller, longtime volunteer of the Trauma Intervention Program of the Merrimack Valley. The event is in memory of Waller, who died of cancer last year.
Information: For details, call 978-975-8471.
