By Kate Kerry Spencer
First, you learn to wait. This is not an easy thing for human beings to do, especially when they are waiting for a heart.
When you are waiting for a heart transplant, your life and the lives of those around you, becomes a kind of waiting room. In this waiting room you talk, mostly amongst yourselves, laugh, cry, read the same magazine 100 times, fall asleep restless, wake up tired and watch for the holder of the keys to open the door and let you out of the waiting room and into the garden. You know that garden is out there somewhere. You hope your body can withstand the waiting room and live to feel the sun on your face and see the perfect blue of the sky above you again that you used to take for granted, like some old umbrella.
My husband is waiting for a heart. It has been three years since he was put on the transplant list. Hearts are not easy organs to come by and getting a match can take years.
Given this wait, and the greatly reduced function of his heart, my husband received a mechanical heart as a bridge to transplant. When the first mechanical heart ran into difficulties, it was replaced with a new one. These devices are literally life savers and both of them did indeed allow my husband to continue to live while he waited for the pulsing, glorious strength of a healthy human heart.
A few weeks ago, that strong new heart came.
It was nothing like the movies. There was no soundtrack, no lit-from-within lighting, no perfectly packaged moments. It was as big and brave and challenging as life itself.
There are some exacting truths about heart transplants and the most exacting truth is that one person has to die in order for another person to live. There are a lot of deep and mixed feelings about that reality, both for the donor’s and the recipient’s families. One person’s end is another’s beginning and one family’s heartbreak is another family’s salvation.
The solace in that reckoning, however long it takes for at least some of that to work its way through, is that because of the gift of organ donation, life continues in some way that shelters something essential and sustaining in both donor and recipient. Once you are touched by that grace, you are more likely to want to pass it on. And therein is the selfless good that sees its end as another’s beginning.
“It’s the closest thing to resurrection that happens in human life”
“It’s the closest thing to resurrection that happens in human life,” the doctor said to me the afternoon that my husband got the call. The doctor was right. He’s been right all along.
There’s a reason that the human heart is a universal symbol of love, courage, faith and selflessness. It is the one organ that stirs all the others to push through to this amazing adventure of life. The donor family knew this instinctively. At least that’s what I imagine.
In reality, I know virtually nothing about the donor except that it was a very young person who might have been in an accident. I imagine the intensity of the time period between when the family knew there was no hope for their child and the decision to give an older stranger the definitively human organ of their child. I imagine that the family wanted some of the vitality of that young life force to be shared in whatever way it could be.
Whatever may or may not be accurate in my imagining, the reality is that there is no way to adequately thank someone for such a gift. The best and only thing a recipient and their family can do is to live their own lives fully, with gratitude and generosity, and pass that spirit of generosity on to someone else in need.
Sometimes, if you’ve waited for and received a heart transplant, you still might have to get a lot worse before you get a little better. This is what happened to my husband. In CICU for nearly three weeks, he had to fight again for the life of that donor heart. There were times that he seemed close to leaving this world without ever getting to know that precious heart at all.
But one day, the nurses took my husband to the outdoor patio on the second floor to feel the sun on his face. Several helicopters were circling the landing pad of the hospital that day. One of the helicopters came in a tiny bit sideways and the force of one of the blades, many floors above the patio, pulled the hair of the nursing staff and my husband straight up in the air. It was like a scene from one of those old slapstick comedies where a person sticks their wet finger in a light socket.
One of the nurses giggled as she felt her hair rise up, while the other sat semi-stoic. My husband, however, was awakened, surprised and more than mildly pissed off by the hair-raising moment. And from that moment on the patio, he never stopped dreaming, pushing and fighting to get out of the hospital and back into the hair-raising adventure of living. Sometimes all we need is a push, or a pull, to bring us out of the waiting room and back to life.
Freed from that waiting room, my husband can now walk through the garden of the world. There will be challenges, of course. There will be obstacles. But in and around all of that, there will be life. There will be life.
As a family member and caregiver, I spent a lot of time in my own version of the waiting room. I was conscious and fully present for all the emergency surgeries and excruciatingly close calls of years of medical crises. Unlike the patient, I was not under anesthesia. But I too was under siege. Now, my own heart and life is renewed and I can’t wait to get back to living it, loving it and writing it.
There are many ways to be reborn in this life. Whether that’s through the selfless generosity of a stranger, the steady sound of a child calling your name, or the pull of creating something from a handful of tenacious stardust, find it, embrace it and live it with all your heart.
ABOUT KATE
Kate Kerry Spencer is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and publisher. Learn more about her upcoming memoir, Smoke: A Story of Love, Lies and Cigarettes.
Smoke is the story of fatal consolations--tobacco, denial and deceit--and the second chances that can come to us in the most unlikely places. For this mother and daughter it was a rehab center where the two women wrestled with cigarettes, scrambled brains and each other--and in the process, found the long way back to love.