STEVE KOLOSKUS HAS FACED MORE THAN HIS SHARE OF CHALLENGES over the past 15 years. As luck would have it, the marketing and design professional has found a renewal of the spirit in a rather impressive garden flourishing next to his S. Pearl St. workplace.

“It feels like life giving back to me,” he says, gesturing toward a dense green expanse of thriving vegetables. “I mean, look at these little pole beans just reaching out for something to grab onto. I cannot believe the energy and creativity I found here, when for a long time I didn’t have any energy or creativity.”

Koloskus battled non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1997 and was slowly regaining his health when his five-year-old son was hit and killed by a car in January 2002 while riding a skateboard. “That walk through the forest of child loss, it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve learned to live with it,” he says. “I imagine it’s what it must be like to have an amputation. I have the ghost pain. I feel like he’s still there when he’s not. I had to learn to adapt everything I ever thought I had or was or thought I would be.”

The overwhelming grief took a toll on his marriage and his wife left him to raise his then eight-year-old son. In 2007, the cancer returned and Koloskus underwent extensive radiation, chemotherapy, and an autologous stem cell transplant. During his three-week hospitalization at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center, he rode a stationary bike to boost his strength and spirits. Following the successful treatment, with help from fraternity brothers at his alma mater Colorado College, he completed the Ride the Rockies tour the following year, raising $5,000 in contributions for the American Cancer Society. He later endured complicated surgery to replace a life-threatening blocked bile duct damaged during cancer treatment.

And then came the recession. “Almost all our clients called and said, stop whatever you’re doing,” he says. “In our heyday we were probably mentioned in the top 10 agencies in town. Then as I was missing in action, we foundered and we haven’t completely recovered yet. This is not a business where you can phone it in. I’m the guy at the helm doing the business development, creating ideas or reviewing the ideas others create. It’s been a challenge.”

A Connecticut native, Koloskus knew from the moment he stepped off the plane in Colorado to attend CC that he’d found his new home. He graduated with a degree in English, later earned an associate degree in graphic design and commercial art, and landed a job with the Denver Post. He gained big agency experience in St. Louis and Denver before launching his own company. “After the first bout with cancer I named the company Extra Strength,” he says. “The name exists on two levels. One of them is in homage to a George Carlin routine years ago about why would anyone buy regular strength when there was extra strength? I thought that was really funny. But it’s also because there are times when you’re going to need some extra strength.”

Raising his older son (now at California College of the Arts) and creating and maintaining the garden have sustained him. He likes to repeat part of a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote he keeps on his desk that talks about things in life you have to endure. “And then it goes on to say something like, ‘To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child or a garden patch ...’ My life became about raising my son and I think I did a pretty good job. And now it’s about this garden. This is my Zen place. I’m here with the birds in the morning and I leave when I can’t see anymore. For me it’s symbolic of thinking creatively again, because there was a time when I hated coming here to my office. At one point it was my proudest achievement, this property, this agency, and then it all fell apart with no warning.”

But working the garden with help from his next-door neighbor continues to invigorate and inspire. A board member of the Pearl Street Merchants Association whose firm does advertising for the weekly farmers market and other neighborhood events, Koloskus began thinking about possibilities for redeveloping his property in alignment with its mixed-use zoning classification. “Working with city planners, there’s a phrase called ‘highest and best use.’ From a developmental point of view that means maximizing the property in all the ways you would expect. So I started looking at developing in a way that would make me right financially. I have a lot of medical bills to pay off, so that would mean having my business here, building several town homes, and living in one of them.”

But an entirely different interpretation of “highest and best use” beckoned. “What if the whole corner was some sort of green garden space like this, and maybe some kind of community resource? Taking what’s now concrete out in the parking lot and turning it back into arable land with chickens and a goat or two? Creating a place where people could meet and have classes and just hang out?”

Koloskus envisions a not-for-profit concept where people could come to connect to gardening, attend classes in homespun skills such as quilting and canning, and reconnect with the earth, each other, and themselves. “Obviously the idea of field to table and locally grown foods is wildly popular now. But I’d also like to see a place where people who have had some life tragedies could come and be welcomed and work or just sit and be.”

He’s also considering offering space for children who’ve lost siblings to connect with each other. “The former Broncos quarterback Brian Griese lost his mom when he was quite young and started the nonprofit Judi’s House for kids who’d experienced traumatic loss. My son, Jack, was one of the first kids to go there and it was very valuable to him, but the entire time he met lots of kids who’d lost parents but none who’d lost a sibling. Maybe something like that could happen here for kids and parents.”

Although he’s always had a backyard garden, his relationship with this one continues to surprise him. “I’m very self-taught and that feels right. I have an idea that there’s going to be a little corn maze right there – the world’s smallest. Lots of times I’m in here working or weeding and people walk by and I can hear them saying, ‘What’s this? This is really cool.’ I can’t say that I would pretend to understand what a true, dyed-in-the-wool farmer whose living depended on it feels, but we had some hail damage the first summer and I cried.”

Admittedly still more essence than form, the possibilities continue to excite him. “There are these new modular buildings I looked at last week that are much different than they used to be and very cool. I can see incorporating those into this plan. In my mind I can see people taking classes that reconnect us to our roots. Especially now when we’re so digitalized and overloaded, this could be a space where people could unplug and reconnect. It fascinates me that I come out here and there’s usually people hanging out at these tables. It feels like my field of dreams.”