Dear Friend,

The call could come at any time. During dinner, while the clothes are drying, at a Walmart checkout line, 45 minutes into a movie, in the middle of rush hour traffic or in the middle of the night; restlessly sleeping as we’ve now become accustomed. There’s no telling where or how we’ll be, which is an impossible state to find comfort in. But then again, this isn’t a game of comfort or convenience or calculations. I’m sure the events will come as much of a surprise to you and your world as it will to us and ours. For all we know, you’ll also be sitting at the dinner table for Sunday leftovers or folding three loads of laundry or picking up your kids from school or coming home from spring break spent at your in-law’s cabin in Tahoe. The call could come at any time and under any circumstance, bringing us together in a clash of events that will forever hence be our eternal kinship. You’re going to give my wife your lungs and a second life. And all we’ll know of you is that you didn’t see death coming.

I guess I should start by telling you a little bit about Mackenzie. She is the eldest of two gentle brothers and one amazing sister who all love her like the mother she sometimes is to them. She loves the Fall more than most things and is sensitive to foul language. Babies and puppies make her cry, fart jokes make her laugh, and just about any song on the radio will make her sing. Her diet mainly consists of cold cereal and things you put syrup on, but she can bake almost anything from scratch and have it come out perfect. She isn’t perfect herself, mind you, but she’d be the first one to tell you that. She’d also be the first one to laugh at your failed attempt at a joke. She’s kind that way. She’d be the first one to hold your hand and cry with you, the first one to stand up for you to a bully and the first one to look on the bright side of an otherwise dark day. She’s the first to forgive me, the first to forget my failings, and is always the first responder to my many rescues. And she’s the last woman I ever plan to love.

After about a year of progressive breathing problems, Mackenzie was diagnosed with a terminal lung disease (a rare form of pulmonary hypertension) in August of last year. She was 28. We were married only a few weeks, still wearing the tans from our honeymoon. What followed was a whirlwind of appointments, tests, insurance claims, insurance nightmares, unopened medical bills, prayers, pleadings, fights, compromises and tears, lots of tears. And now, barring other “what if’s” still in the works, we’re anticipating this last portion of our pre-transplant journey in our near future; the point where our stories meet.

Yes, some distance in the possibly close future, our worlds will both shake; yours with tragedy, ours with joy. Somewhere you sit, unaware that, while your breaths go uncounted, hers do – waiting for your relief. Somewhere you sit, hopefully among your loved ones, sharing the relative ease that comes with disease-free living. Somewhere you sit, going through your inbox, unaware of this letter being written to you that I so much want you to read but never will. Because by the time we know your name, know your story and meet your family, it’ll be long passed the possibility of meeting you. But rest in peace and rest assured. Your untimely ending is to be our beginning of a wild future.

In the first days following your donation, my wife will be able to take in her first unassisted, deep breath –  something she hasn’t done for a long time now. She’ll be able to sit up, walk, and dress without being tethered to oxygen. I’ll be able to kiss her lips without feeling tubes on her face. And I imagine she’ll feel whole again, human again.

In the year following, we’ll be able to settle into a life of somewhat normalcy. Maybe we’ll both decide to go to grad school or buy a home or finally take that cliché backpacking trip through Europe. Also in that year following, we anticipate opening the possibility of becoming parents. Exactly what that discussion will be like and what options it will afford us, I don’t know. But it’s an eventuality I’ll fight long and hard for, knowing how deserving Mackenzie is of being a mother, how instinctual her devotion is. And knowing how fiercely single-minded she will be in her love for our children.

In the five or ten or twenty years following, there will be mortgages and dance recitals, root canals and senior proms, flooded basements and maybe even marriage counseling, which I’ll be resistant to at first but later thankful for (because it’ll most likely be my fault anyway). There will be skinned knees, watercolor paintings on refrigerator doors, Christmas Eve traditions, children going off to studies abroad and an altogether full life of intense beauty and complication that will awe us and simultaneously tempt us away from the things that matter most.

And in the thirty  or more years following, when I’ve finally come to terms with my gray hair and love handles, I’ll take Mackenzie’s hand in mine for perhaps the millionth time and, in the silence between us, I’ll hear her breaths pumping through your lungs. And that’s where you’ll always remain, a part of her and a part of us and a part of our children and our families and friends beyond that. Because you will have given my wife what they or I could never give her. I would give her my hands, for she would perform better work with them than I, touch and comfort more lives. I would give her my heart to keep her precious blood flowing in and out of her able limbs, for she would do better with it than I, go farther and serve more. I would give her my own lungs to prolong the sweet words she shares; words without envy, without guile, without pretense or self-purpose. For as hard as I try to speak of things higher and beyond myself, she would form better words with my air than I. Nevertheless, only you, somewhere living and working and breathing, can fulfill what love alone cannot.

And yet, even after all that; after the years and careers and grandchildren and on and on, we too will expire from this world, hopefully leaving behind a legacy as reaching as yours. And when all else is gone, the root of your gift will still ring. Because the things that outlive our bodies are our choices, our love, kindness, charity, and the memories left to our loved ones who will live on and on in our absence. Whoever you are and whatever you’ve been through, we don’t hope for your death any more than I’m sure you don’t hope for hers. But death isn’t the point, is it?

Even if death takes Mackenzie too soon, as it will have already taken you and eventually me, there’s that bit that remains, that ensures all is well. That portion where love and kindness and charity springs, which makes laughter sweet to hear and life too insatiable to merely spectate. That space that will still exist, even after death has made its wash of us; after time and experience has scraped hollow the rest and planted itself triumphant. There will still be that glint of light to carry on the spirit of life brought from death. The leaves that turn from green to gold and gold to brown and, in time, fall to feed the earth; another season and another bloom promised. And on and on and on.

Love, Henry

So, lung transplants ain’t cheap. Click above to send Mackenzie some love, if you’d like.

Dear Mackenzie,

I recently read this story. It’s a sad one, about a young couple and their newborn son, born with brain cancer and given only a handful of months to live. The story starts with a scene told by the Mother. Sometime after he was born, her young son wasn’t able to hold down any fluids and became severely dehydrated. He was hospitalized for about the thousandth time, too crippled by pain to stop crying long enough to sleep, and too taxed to take on any added medicine. She rocked her son back and forth and rubbed his chest and added water droplets to his lips and bathed him in warm water but nothing seemed to soothe him. He simply cried. And when his voice was dry and hollow and barely audible over his wincing face, he cried some more. And when his tears ran dry and there was nothing left to spill, he cried some more. And his mother, alone with him in his hospital room, beyond the immediate help of a staff or family member, searched and grasped for any strand of remedy. But without any other thing to try, without any other person to call out to, without any other prayer to pray, the pleas of her helpless child washed over and through her. Unable and unaided, she dropped her head and wailed out what un-bellowed grief was left inside her and simply waited for the weight of it all to crush her.

I’m not a parent and can’t yet understand such helpless, singlehanded anguish. But I think I may have witnessed some things close to it. There was that time I heard it in the voice of a young widow. I was at the funeral and was probably too young to know what it all meant, but that sound she made left scars on my memory. There was that time I saw it on the terror-slurred face of my post-stroke mother, unable to move or scream out from beneath her darkness. Reaching out to me, her son; helpless, hopeless, voiceless. And I saw it in your mother’s eyes the day she was told her oldest child, the daughter she’d fought so hard to keep alive as a premature baby, was about to begin the wildest, most frightening ride of her young life. And I saw it in her eyes when she came with us to your pulmonary function tests and could barely stand seeing you shudder with difficulty to get through each puff; seeing firsthand the cold grip this disease was tightening around you. And I’ve continued to see it in her eyes when, assault after assault, our hearts have been called on to endure more and more and then mercilessly more. As if the untold amount of stolen tomorrows weren’t enough.

It’s a look maybe only a mother’s eyes can produce; one that sees the universe in the face of her child and, in it, stores all the praise and hope of her own unfinished business, her own unmet triumphs. Perhaps it’s in our children and in our children’s children that we live forever, that we’re made perfect. But whatever the case, it’s terrible to encounter; that look.

Those are also the same eyes I glanced into on the day I proposed to you at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on that rainy New York Sunday. She and I had schemed the whole thing, weeks in advance, and when the day finally came I saw nothing but sheer acceptance and appreciation in her eyes. And that lifted a 2,000 pound load off my shoulders because your mom is the kind of woman every man wants approval from, especially the man wanting to marry one of her two amazing daughters.

They’re the eyes that cried with us on countless nights as we used what little wisdom we had to piece together some sort of meaning when it came to love and fear and relationships.

They’re the eyes that were bloodshot and puffy after a sleepless night spent in a packed hotel room filled with my snoring that I really need to get checked out once and for all.

And they’re the eyes that saw the happiest day of my life; the day she gave up a daughter and the day I gained an entire family. When we all gathered in a single room and there was nothing but light and peace. And her eyes danced between you and me, and she saw us both as one; one of a kind and one of her own.

Hard as it is, I’m glad to have seen the spectrum of your life operate through your mother’s eyes.

Otherwise, it all wouldn’t mean as much to me without knowing how close you were to not surviving your birth. A young mother yearning to reach and hold and comfort her two and a half pound baby, yearning to then reach into her baby’s 28 year-old chest and coax away the monster shortening her breath.

I’m privileged to know the eyes that saw your feet plant their first steps, your lips shape their first words, your tongue taste its first snowflake.

Otherwise, It’d be hard to appreciate the magic through which you see the world; the problems that always have solutions, the villains who always deserve kindness, the fallen sparrow who will always have a song and a prayer, and the redeeming good that can always be done no matter how tired, how broke, or how much you may need the good deed yourself.

It’s an honor to know the eyes that have seen you wade and struggle through bad denim outfits, self-centered boyfriends, unfortunate bouts of Bell’s palsy, mean high school girls and lost retainers.

Otherwise, it’d be hard to imagine what I would make of the woman who constantly forgives me, who constantly forces me to forgive myself, and who constantly pushes me to do the same for others, for everyone.

And it’s with gratitude that I am able to look into the eyes of the woman who gave you life and see the two pound baby who would then become the perpetually happy child who would then become the consciously kind young lady who would then become the dauntless woman who would come to pump new blood into my heart, spring new vision into my sight, and breathe new life into my lungs at the beginning of every day.

Otherwise, how else would I have found certain corners of myself? How would I have come to see the world in all its light or the people in all their goodness? How would I be able to continually collect the strength needed to lift my head, lift my spirit, and lift my voice to the heavens with thanks for the good and thanks for the bad and thanks for everything in between?

If ever I need to find the answers, your mother’s eyes are where I’ll find them. She keeps you in there. The years and years and sad times and Christmases and school plays and divorce and new homes and new lives and old friends and setbacks and fallbacks and Fall breaks and everything else I’ve missed but yearn to know. And at times, mostly recently, there’s a pain that pushes it all to the surface, leaving your mother fighting the tears back, lest bits of you come flowing out with them.

Let them flow, Jen. Let them flow out and into me. Trust a portion of them to my safeguarding. And shoulder to shoulder, we’ll keep her alive forever.

Love, H

 

Dear Mackenzie,

Grief was always something that happened to other people in other places around me, but never to me. Not directly. I used to think grief was simply a state everyone eventually evolved into, like achy joints and ear hair. However, I’ve come to feel that gracefully mourning a loved one is an ability that can be mastered at any age. And for too many good people, it’s learned too soon and descends harder than I am yet able to understand or accept. Grief and loss and endings and grace; 29 years in this life and I’d never given it much thought. Now, it’s nearly all I think about. And not only in ways that it relates to us specifically, but also in ways that relate to the bigger world beyond you and me.

In high school, people were always surprised to find out that A.J. Pope and I are cousins. For starters, we were never very close or very much alike. He was always much more involved than me, more athletic, and actually went to his classes. I, on the other hand, was the only boy in the advanced dance class, was kicked off the moot court team for “over arguing”, and spent the majority of my senior year at Taco Bell. All hard to believe, I know. But I didn’t have to know A.J. perfectly to know firsthand of his kindness. Everyone who knew him knew that; that he’s calm but strong, witty but kind, fierce in his loyalty and wise beyond his years. All of which only added to my ache when, on February 5th, he and his lovely wife, Lizette, lost a newborn child for the second time. He lived 10 days.

What limits are there to the scope and breadth of anguish a single soul can bear? And what parts of the body does a grief that heavy go when everywhere else is full? I want to know. If there are words to satisfy, I want to know. At the very least, I wish I had an idea; just one idea that I could string to another and then string to another and then string to another until I had enough slack to make partial sense of it all. But I don’t. All I have is what I know, which isn’t much and might not help. But it comes from the heart, a heart that breaks for them in ways I can only second-hand imagine.

I know that I have memories of A.J., good memories that I’d probably be able to piece together to accurately describe his goodness to a stranger. I know many more who know him and have deeper memories of him, longer memories to fill in the holes and flesh out the man. I know enough of Lizette to know there are countless others who can retell her laughs and faces and happy times and hair dos. And I imagine a trial like this can make one feel evaporated, muted from life. But I know there’s enough of A.J. and Lizette in all of us to keep the spirit of them and their beautiful family forever vibrant and effectual in this life.

I know that, as opposed to what I used to believe, there are no areas of life off-limits to the hands of fate. Or destiny or chance or divine providence or whatever you call it. Part of being here is agreeing to what may and probably will come, and it’s hard and it’s terrifying and at times it keeps me from leaving my bed in the morning. But I think and I hope that it’s as fair and as justified as it is severe and deafening. For as exposed as we are to the hot hand of suffering, we’re just as susceptible to an unstoppable potential for power and godliness. Their world may deservedly feel desolate, but I know the ground they now walk is sacred and promised and reserved for the strongest shoulders of the most worthy.

I know that a healthy portion of this life is spent trying to reconcile the distance between time and eternity. More than that, however, may simply be reconciling the distance between the 9th and the 10th day of baby Likio’s life – the time it took to shake a world and loosen the fibers of a young and righteous home. And beyond that, what of the days to follow? What will fill the 11th day and then the 12th and then the 4,000th? 

I only know a little bit. But I feel I know they’ll cross this desolate land, however many days it may take from this one. And in addition to their personal strength, I know they’ll make it because of the earthly and heavenly concourse behind them and ahead of them, on their left and on their right, in their past and in their future and aiding them from on high. They’ll cross this desolate land, because maybe that’s why we’re all still here. And maybe they’re one of the select few entrusted with the directions and the aptitude necessary to crossing. And when they get there, they’ll know the knowing we all seek. And they’ll feel the warmth and see the purpose and touch the faces of their beloved and sing the sweet words of life lost and reclaimed. And perhaps they’ll be honored for the multitude of their endurances in this life and the example they showed all of us. And perhaps they’ll look back and take slow, deep breaths and remember, with reverence, the precious price of it all.

Love, H

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https://www.gofundme.com/khncm758