As the holidays approach, I am finding myself trying to explain to people over and over again why I downplay the season so much. I'm NOT a scrooge. I just have a hard time this time of year, as so many who have lost someone close to them do. Here's a story I wrote a few years after Mom died-- Can it REALLY have been almost 6 years?!?!?!
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Mom’s memorial service was easily the most beautiful I had ever been to. We didn’t want it to be a maudlin affair. We created displays celebrating her life, read her favorite childhood story, and played “hippie” music (Donovan), a move that was lost on many of the more traditional thinking relatives. Matthew, Dad, and I had each chosen a song to be played. I chose Sarah Maclaughlin’s “Angel.” Mom believed that if you open your hearts, you will hear your angel’s words of encouragement that they whisper to you when you most need it. Right there at the memorial service, a guardian angel started to speak to me, slowly at first, but nevertheless openly.
It started with a sparkle, just barely caught out of the corner of my eye. When I looked to see what it was I had to bob back and forth a bit to find it again. About 15 feet away, on the floor, there was a distinctive pinkish sparkle. Fixing my eyes on the spot so as not to lose it, I walked over to see what it was. My heart was already beating in my chest as I bent over and picked up a single piece of heart shaped mylar confetti. I was overcome with the most exhilarating sense of warmth—I felt it in my chest, in the very center of my being, emanating outward from my heart. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that the sparkling heart was Mom’s way of telling me that she was there with me, and that I would never be alone. I taped the heart onto a small card that we had had printed for the service with a quote from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: “To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us strength forever.” I couldn’t possibly have known that that was just the beginning…
When I think back to when Mom had her heart transplant on March 23, 1993, I remember that I wasn’t scared. Sure, I was anxious, but somehow I just knew that everything was going to be ok. It was a different feeling when I was sitting with her at the hospital nearly eight years later on the evening of January 25, 2001. She had been put back on the waiting list for another transplant, but this time I knew that she didn’t have the same fighting spirit she had had almost eight years earlier. Yet that night, she was awake and almost energetic, greeting visitors and joking around just enough to almost give us hope. Even so, I felt the need to stay with her that night. I sat by her bed, holding her hand, not knowing what to say. I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me, and how I could still feel the warmth and love of being cradled into her arms when I was 12 years old and was chased home by bullies, or about emerging from my turbulent teens and realizing that she was my best friend, or the first time I shared with her the pain of having my heart broken. More than anything I wanted her to be proud of me, and I wanted her to tell me that night that I had not failed her. But I knew she didn’t feel like talking-- she had been so uncomfortable those last few days-- and it gave me the perfect excuse not to go there. So we just sat there, holding hands and pretending to watch TV until she fell asleep around 2:30 am.
Feeling very alone and frightened, I pulled the chair over next to the bed and sat there, listening to the sounds of the monitors and her labored breathing and praying for another miracle—and for an unspeakable tragedy. There is a horrific guilt in knowing that someone else has to die so my Mom wouldn’t be taken away from me. Yet, I was thinking about it. I was thinking about the snowstorm that had been forecast, and wondering if the roads would be bad-- and trying not to think about it-- all at the same. Of course, Mom was also aware of what had to happen. How could she NOT be? She had struggled for a year before being able to write a letter to her donor family after her transplant. She said then that the only words she could come up were “thank you” yet she felt those two little words were so insufficient. She grappled with trying to understand how to justify her second chance at life, a chance that went hand in hand with another family’s loss, and the thought of going through that guilt again was too much for her to bear. Yet she had put up a noble front and agreed, at least on the outside, to give it a go. All of these things clouded my dreams as I slept by her bedside that last night.
When I woke up a few hours later, I immediately noticed that her heart rate was down. The nurse had already called the doctor. It was about 6:30 am on the 26th. Dad and Matthew were supposed to be there at 7:30, so I just sat there holding her hand. Over the background noise of the oxygen tubes and heart monitor, she whispered to me "I think I'm dieing." I didn’t know what to say, so I told her to just hang on a little while-- Dad and Matthew were on their way.
They arrived with a cautious yet upbeat energy that people have when they don’t want others to know how really scared they are. They were smiling and seemed to still be carrying with them that hope from her energy the night before. I motioned to the heart monitor and told them that the doctor was on his way. We all sat around the bed and held her hands and rubbed her feet-- she always loved that.
I have often heard of stories describing near-death expereinces, but I never expected to witness anything like what happened next.
In a brief moment where she seemed to become lucid, Mom opened her eyes and looked toward the foot of the bed and very distinctly and clearly said, "Mother, quit ranting!" Grandma B. had died about 15 months earlier, and Mom had been noticably depressed ever since. At that particular moment in the hospital room, Grandma was there--at least to my Mother. Dad, Matthew and I all looked at each other in amazement, seeking confirmation about what we were witnessing. Then as suddenly as it had perked up, she faded, and her heartbeat gradually grew slower and slower. It was an odd thing, feeling the hope fade into an understanding that it was time to let her go.
I had never seen anyone die before, and I don’t know what I was expecting. I remember hearing the beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor turn into a steady tone and looking up to see the flat line as the blip moved across the screen (it seemed like SUCH a cliche!), but she was still struggling to catch her breath. It was as if her lungs didn’t yet realize that it was time to let go and were trying to encourage her heart to keep going. At that point she looked up at me, and for the briefest of moments, our eyes locked. We all told her we loved her, and with one last breath, she was quiet. She was 54 years old.
When we told some family members about Mom's calling out just before she died, most assumed it meant that Grandma was there to welcome her. I don't believe it. I know Grandma. She was incredibly loving, but stubborn, and I know that she knew that Mom was too young--that I (we) still needed her. That we weren't ready to let her go. I know in my soul that Grandma was there telling her to go back, to stay with us, to fight. But Mom had made up her mind, and was ready. "Quit ranting" was intended to tell Grandma in no uncertain terms that she had made up her mind. In a way, it made it bearable knowing that Mom was making the choice to go and be with HER mom. I can understand that, even if I couldn't quite accept that she was leaving me.
We didn't stay. Dad and Matthew said their goodbyes and left, while I stayed behind for one last moment. I kissed Mom on the forhead and promised her that we would all take care of each other, even though we are spread out across the country. The doctor arrived as we were about to leave. I wouldn't look at him, because, if I had, all the anger I felt at all the doctors over the years-- all the arrogant fools that had missed her heart problems for so long and failed to diagnose the heart attacks that were slowly leading to her heart failure-- would have flooded out at him. I walked past him and out the door into the snow that had just started falling.
Shortly after we returned home, we received a phone call from a very pleasant woman who expressed her sympathy and wondered if we had ever discussed tissue donation as a family. We all looked at each other and smiled. Less than an hour after Mom had died, we were gently reminded that there was a chance for her to “pay forward” some of the miracle our family had received. We must have been the easiest “consent” call she had ever made! It was such a gift to us to be able to break through the numbness and make this important decision. We heard later that 17 people benefited from her tissue, including bone, cartelidge, skin and eyes.
Trying to get back into a routine after Mom died was indescribable. People didn’t seem to understand that my entire world had changed. I managed to get up, remind myself to keep breathing, and forced myself to try to keep going, numbly moving through an unknowing world. I tried to reach out, but couldn’t do it. I was scared of how I was feeling, but felt powerless to change it.
After a few weeks of struggling to adjust to the new world in which I found myself, that angel from the memorial service began speaking to me again. One afternoon, I was walking alone through a shopping mall and I inadvertently kicked something. It rattled off to the side of the walkway, but I followed it to see what it was. When I picked it up, that warm pulsating feeling in my heart started again. It was a small piece of red heart-shaped plastic set in a plastic ring. I put it in my pocket and smiled all the way home. It wasn’t until a later trip to the mall that I discovered that it was the top of a Harry Potter “magic potion” vial from a children’s toy display.
Two days later, I noticed something sticking out from under a pile of leaves on the sidewalk next to my car. I picked it up, and found it to be a child’s bracelet strung on a small piece of elastic. The beads were alternating purple “diamonds” (Mom’s favorite color) and white hearts with little smiley faces on them. At this point, I knew that the hearts were not just a passing phase.
They continued to appear over the next few weeks: a heart sticker on the ground near the entrance to the subway; another piece of heart-shaped confetti on the floor of a diner I go to in Chelsea; a small plastic heart-shaped charm with a purple “peace” sign in the middle; a paisley bedspread that I have used for years without ever noticing the distinctly identifiable hearts worked into the pattern.
Once, as I was walking home at night, someone inside a house I was passing by turned on a light which cast a heart-shaped shadow of the ornate ironwork fence onto the sidewalk in front of me. Soon after, I found a handful of heart-shaped candies in the middle of a street—in the exact spot where Dad and I had been run down by a car the week before yet miraculously walked away relatively unharmed.
They have continued steadily in the past [almost] six years: yet another piece of mylar heart-shaped confetti; a silver heart locket; a heart shaped cardboard gift tag; a deflated heart balloon partially buried in the sand on Fire Island; a few more heart-shaped stickers; a stuffed plush heart toy; a coffee stir-stick with a heart topper; a penny with a heart cut out of the center; children’s sunglasses with heart shaped rims; a heart magnet. I keep them all in a special place and pull them out when I need to be reminded that I am never alone. In this day and age with pop-culture so prevalent, hearts are everywhere, but MY hearts are different. They’re not the items on gift shop shelves, or pictures. Each and every one of them is oddly out of place, as if left intentionally for me to find, each one a miracle, and they appear when I least expect them.
I have opened myself to the magic of these miracles and celebrate them when they happen. They also serve as a reminder that because of the generosity of a grieving family back in March of 1993, Mom was given a new heart, and our family was given an extra 7 years, 10 months, and 3 days with her. Donating her tissue when she left to become my guardian angel was the easiest and most important decision I have ever made, and I will continue to tell the world about the miracle of organ and tissue donation so others can know the joys of sharing life.
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Please visit the website for the
United Network for Organ Sharing to find out more information about organ and tissue donation, sign your driver's license indicating your wish to become a donor, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, TALK TO YOUR FAMILY ABOUT YOUR WISHES.
