The gardens didn’t pause for mourning. In the raised beds Rick had built, tomatoes hung heavy and squash sprawled beyond their borders. Throughout the property, Sherry’s daylilies kept opening, her roses demanded deadheading, and the perennials she’d placed with such care refused to acknowledge her absence. That first August morning in 2020, a few weeks after her death, Rick Stiller stood in the early light—a slight man with a gray ponytail and a photographer’s eye for composition—wondering how he was supposed to tend both gardens now. For forty years, they’d divided the labor: his vegetables, her flowers, both of them Master Gardeners maintaining this improbable acre and a half of wilderness tucked along Tulsa’s historic Crow Creek. But now the earth wanted things from him alone.
For two decades, Rick had been two people. He was the commercial photographer clients hired for architectural interiors, brochures, annual reports, and product shots—precise, reliable, artful. And he was Sherry’s caretaker, a role that consumed him in ways even he didn’t fully comprehend until it was over. She’d been sick for twenty years. Not sick in the manageable sense. Sick in the way that reshapes a marriage, that turns a partnership into something else—something more like devotion mixed with endurance. Autoimmune conditions no one could quite name. Skin problems. Relentless susceptibility to every virus. Food intolerances that narrowed her world. Environmental sensitivities that made their home both sanctuary and prison.
And pain. Always pain. The kind that changes a person.
Sherry became someone Rick barely recognized—hostile where she’d been warm, mean where she’d been generous. It wasn’t her fault. Pain does that. Chronic illness does that. But knowing it wasn’t her fault didn’t make it easier to absorb the daily erosions, the small cruelties that accumulated like sediment. He stayed. Of course he stayed. That’s who Rick was—quiet, loyal to a degree that made friends worry, soft-spoken to the point where you sometimes had to lean in to hear him. He stayed through all of it, and when she died on July 25, 2020, he felt something he couldn’t say aloud: relief.
And then, the guilt of that relief.
My wife’s illness was the defining challenge of my later years. For over two decades, I watched her struggle with chronic health issues that doctors couldn’t fully diagnose or treat.
Rick Stiller didn’t set out to be a gardener or a caretaker. He set out to be someone who made things beautiful. Photography was his trade, his art, his livelihood. For nearly forty years, he captured spaces—the way light fell through a window in a restored Victorian, the angles that made a product look essential rather than merely useful. It was good work. Satisfying work. Work that required patience, an eye for detail, and the ability to see what others missed.
Rick Stiller grew up unmoored. Born in the late 1940s, he moved constantly—seven different elementary schools by the time he was in sixth grade. Relocating because of divorce and separation forced Rick to learn that friendships were temporary, that fitting in meant constant recalibration. He was the perpetual new kid, the one who had to decode different social hierarchies every year or two. It taught him to observe, to read rooms, to move quietly through spaces without demanding too much attention.
Music became his anchor—He taught himself to play bass to join a rock band in high school, started and ran the highest volume record store in Wisconsin, and became a college radio DJ, where he curated hours of sound for whoever was listening. He mastered his instrument and toured with Uncle Pleasant, a southern rock band, for a year. So, when a bassist didn’t show up for a gig at a Florida club in January 1973, Rick was asked to fill in. That night, Sherry walked in—a star student in Interior Design at Ringling School of Art, glammed up at her classmates’ insistence, not usually the club type. Two visual artists who weren’t supposed to be there, finding each other. They became inseparable and moved to Tulsa together in the fall of 1974.
Photography came later, almost accidentally—a way to capture the world as he saw it, not as others insisted it should be. The camera gave him permission to reveal his subject’s secrets, to find beauty in angles and light that presented the mundane as glamorous. It became his livelihood, his art, his quiet rebellion against a childhood spent trying to disappear. For nearly forty years, he built a career creating images that captured what architects and designers intended, ad agencies demanded, and magazines needed, translating vision into captivating illustrations.
Photography was solitary work, but the garden he and Sherry built together was different—a shared project, a place where they could create something living, something that changed with the seasons and rewarded attention. They earned their Master Gardener certifications together, studied soil composition and companion planting, and learned which tomatoes thrived in Oklahoma’s extreme weather. The property itself was improbable—a densely wooded acre and a half tucked impossibly into a residential neighborhood, accessed by a narrow drive that felt like a secret passage. Neighbors didn’t know it existed. But Rick and Sherry knew.
They’d built a small Eden there, wild enough to feel like escape, tended enough to produce mountains of organic vegetables and flowers, a bounty shared with friends and strangers alike.
It was the one place Sherry felt well. Or well enough. The garden asked nothing of her except presence. Rick did the heavy work—the digging, the hauling, the endless vigilance against pests and weather. She moved through it slowly, touching leaves, deadheading roses, sitting in the shade when her body demanded rest. The garden held them both in a persistent and grateful embrace.
And then it held only him.
The first year after Sherry’s death felt like drowning in air. Rick had never lived alone. Not really. Fifty years in Tulsa, most of them in this house, all of them defined by partnership — first building a life, then managing an illness, then… what? The freedom was disorienting. He could eat what he wanted. Sleep when he wanted. Make plans without calculating energy levels and symptom flares. He could say yes to things.
But he didn’t. He needed time to adapt to a new perspective on life.
An old friend reached out. Someone who understood without needing explanation. She visited the garden, and returned again and again. She didn’t push; she just kept the conversation going. And slowly — so slowly Rick barely noticed it happening — he started answering. They talked and listened. She didn’t try to fix him. She just reminded him, gently and persistently, that it was time to give up being a hermit and get on with living a bountiful life.
It took a year. A full year of fog and half-presence, of tending the garden because it needed tending, of moving through days like they were something to survive rather than inhabit. And then, gradually, something shifted. Not healing exactly. Not closure. But a tentative recognition that he’d been holding his breath for twenty years, and maybe — just maybe — he could let it out now.
“She taught me that I could embrace love in my life after I lost the love of my life.”
Rick started writing. Not assignments. Not captions for architectural photos. Engaging and entertaining novels.
It had begun six or eight years earlier—before Sherry died, though the impulse might have been connected to everything he couldn’t say aloud. First came Morgan’s Knot, a young adult fantasy series centered on the magic of nature. Eight volumes published, six more ready to go. Then Dealer, a novel about the first commercial-grade marijuana importation system in the early seventies—the world he’d lived through, the risks people took when freedom looked different. He’s just publishing its companion, Peachtree, an unvarnished and unapologetic romp through sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll in the late sixties.
The Redemption Series emerged from darker concerns—five published volumes beginning with Nellis Gray, exploring the erosion of democratic norms and the concentration of power in dangerous hands. Political novels, essentially, though Rick would probably call them warnings. He’s published nearly a hundred essays too, tracking what he sees as threats to institutions he once considered vital and permanent.
And now, hardest of all: a memoir. An attempt to make sense of a lifetime of personal journeys and artistic achievement that resulted in his dedication and commitment during those twenty years of caregiving, and who he was on the other side of them. What does it mean to stay? What’s the difference between devotion and self-erasure? How do you honor someone’s suffering without letting it define your entire existence?
He doesn’t have all the answers. But he has the questions now, and questions—like gardens—demand tending whether you’re ready or not.
“I’ve realized that purpose doesn’t have to be grand. It can be found in the small, daily acts of caring for my garden, writing, or spending time with my grandchildren.”
Photography shifted too. For decades, Rick photographed other people’s spaces, other people’s products. Commercial work that paid well and fed the creative curiosity in his soul. Now he turned his lens toward what he’d created—not casual snapshots, but deliberate artistic studies. The garden in morning light. The architecture of a rose. The way dew collected on Hosta leaves. The geometry of vegetables ripening in bountiful rows. His floral portraits became something more than documentation; they were meditations on beauty, impermanence, the stubborn insistence of living things.
He traveled when he could, capturing landscapes that felt like the opposite of confinement. Mountains. Open skies. Places where breath came easy. The work appeared on his website—not as a portfolio for clients, but as an exhibition of what he saw when he finally looked up from two decades of vigilance.
His friends noticed the change. Bill Leighty, who’d known Rick for over fifty years, watched him emerge from what could have been bitterness into something quieter but more alive. Rick said yes to dinners, to hikes, to conversations that lasted into the night. He visited his grandchildren more, present in ways he couldn’t be when Sherry’s needs were unpredictable and absolute.
He discovered something unexpected: that a life built from small, intentional acts could feel as substantial as one built from grand achievements. That showing up for a garden, a novel, essay, or a memoir half-written, for grandchildren who needed consistency, for friends who’d waited patiently—that this constituted a life. Not a lesser life. Just a different one.
Rick Stiller is seventy-seven now. He still lives in that improbable house along the creek, still tends the garden that he and Sherry built together. The ponytail is grayer. The hippie aesthetic from the seventies hasn’t changed—long hair, mustache, the look of someone who never bought into conventional presentation. He moves through the world quietly, the way he always has, speaking softly enough that you want to lean in to hear him.
But something’s different now. There’s a lightness to him that wasn’t there before. Not happiness exactly—he’s too honest for easy happiness—but presence. The kind that comes from finally being where you are instead of where you think you should be.
He’s writing his memoir late into the night, after he’s finished the garden chores and there’s time for the kind of reflection that only comes with age and survival. He’s photographing flowers—his own, mostly, though sometimes he travels to find others. He’s being a grandfather who’s actually present, not just physically there but genuinely available.
And he’s tending the garden. Always the garden.
Late summer in Tulsa has a particular insistence to it. The heat doesn’t ask permission. And not far from the house, the flower garden Rick and Sherry tended for years makes its own demands, the way it always has, the way it did long before he ever thought about walking away from the camera.
The tomatoes still need picking. The squash still demands attention.
The daylilies still open their throats to the Oklahoma sun.
But now, when Rick stands in the early morning light with dirt under his fingernails and the weight of memory on his shoulders, he doesn’t hesitate when his garden demands his care.
He just tends it.
Rick Stiller is a retired commercial photographer, published author, Master Gardener, and artist living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His novels, essays, and political thrillers can be found at rickstiller.com, and his floral photography is showcased at rickstillerart.com. If you’d like to share your story for the “Meet [First Name]” series, visit The Encore Project website to learn more.
