Kudzu Man

Author’s note:
This short narrative was written about and for my brother, David Smith, using his voice in my head.



There is a belief in the South that the Asian borne plant, “Kudzu,” would eventually cover and smother everything in its path. The prolific weed, originally planted to stop soil erosion, grew at unstoppable rates covering structures, trees and telephone poles along many acres of roadside land, farms, hills and valleys. Many old-timers feared the plant, believing that one day it would consume the entire South.

The vine’s foliage created monstrous forms when draped over the landscape, and the scary majestic green sculptures were what I would remember the most.

In warm weather months, we always rode with the windows down in our father’s car. In those days, air-conditioning was unheard of, or at least, we had never heard of it. My brothers and sister and I fought over the window sides of the back seat. With six kids, five if my mother put the youngest on her lap, the window seats were the best place to be if you wanted to enjoy the fresh air and scenery. I rarely won the prized positions, having two older siblings that didn’t mind knocking the stew out of me, often convinced me to move over and squeeze into the middle.

Occasionally I got lucky, and could hang my head half-way out of the window like a dog with a flapping tongue. It was during one of these rare and wonderful times that I first noticed the strange formations by the roadside. Towering above the ground were eerie creatures and monsters covered in green. I must have gasped. My parents turned half-way around in their seats. “What’s wrong, son?”

Everyone was staring at me as I pointed towards the trees. “Are those monsters?”

My father’s laughter was fueled by his own childhood memories of the monsters that would eat the South. “No, son, they’re not monsters.”

He went on to explain to all of us about the origin of the Kudzu plant, his own groundless fears as a child, and the fact that the plant was “hard to kill.” His explanation only served to make me more curious about the strange formations, but as we drove through the southern states, I could see that my father was right. The plant was everywhere. It was indeed, hard to kill.

I think about those days as I sit in my “chemo chair,” while one of several hundred gallons of poison I have received over the past fifteen years flows through my veins. I’m tired, depressed, and in excruciating pain most of the time. The doctors told me I wouldn’t live a year after my diagnosis of multiple myeloma, but I’m still here.

One of my first doctors, a wonderful and brilliant man, nicknamed me “Kudzu” when I kept bouncing back from death’s door. The word “bouncing” is a stretch; I just wish I could walk normally. There’s another strange word for me, “normally.” I haven’t been 'normal' since my first bout with cancer as a three-month old baby that left me crippled for the rest of my life. But the two cancers are unrelated, or at least one would think since there was a forty-something year stretch of time between the two.

I think about the prolific weed called “Kudzu,” of the stories and fears the plant ensued for nearly a century, and I wonder if the essence of its being is in fact more correctly correlated to the terrible and seemingly unstoppable disease that has been my life for so many torturous years. The speed and aggressiveness at which the vine grows, the invasiveness to anything in its path, and the difficulty the southern states had in stopping its path of destruction, all of that defines cancer.

I look around the oncology treatment room every time I’m here, at the smiling faces of sad patients, of the hopeful faces of the hopeless, of the angry faces of the helpless, and I know. I’ve been where every one of them has been and more. We all hope, cry, get angry, and we are all “kudzu.” Because eventually, as with the plant that consumes the trees and everything else in its path, the disease consumes us physically and mentally and steals our true identities. We start to call it “my cancer,” and we become it, the disease, the Kudzu.

The End