An Easy Choice

     There is a split second while you're falling (slightly longer if its a big fall) when you wonder how things are going to end.  Fortunately, the time between becoming airborne and hitting the ground is often not long enough to fret about such things.  So it was the day I went to the hospital to have my blood tested to see if I was a suitable kidney donor for my friend.  Because I live over an hour away from the hospital where the surgery will take place, I was mailed a box of test tubes and orders to take to my local hospital to have the blood drawn and then mailed next day air back to the lab.  Strangely enough, it was the box of test tubes I was most concerned with at that peaceful moment between the slip and the hit.  It was just a wet patch of floor but I had encountered it with such force that the fall was intense, knocking the wind out of me and the box of test tubes out of my hands and across the hospital walkway. 
     It would have been an interesting development had my first step at being an altruistic kidney donor turned out instead to be the day I got my first broken bone but as things happen it was simply a bump in the road.  I got myself up, glared sternly but compassionately at the man mopping the floor and helped a couple of other people across the wet patch.  Then things went back to normal....or normal for me anyway.
     The path that lead to that slip and fall, let's face it, had been a bit rocky anyway.  It had been four years since my partner's heart attack, four years since I had quit smoking, four years since I had encountered my own labyrinth of health issues.  It had also been two years since I had started losing a half a dozen people very close to me, often far too young and far too quickly.  You don't mean to but you begin to wonder why at the end of the day some people live through the most incredible turmoil and crisis and some succumb to an aggressive disease like an icicle in the sun.  Wonder all you want, though.  It doesn't make a bit of difference. That was the knowledge I took with me into this next experience and it carries me through every moment of it.  I often say that "knowing is better than not knowing" but when it isn't possible to "know", there is no sense in imagining what could go wrong (or right).  Just living through the process is the best we can manage and things always turn out as they were meant to in the end anyway.
     If you have ever known someone who has gone through the process of dying, you know that there is a look in their eyes, even in the most dire situations, where they would give anything to survive whatever it is that is taking them from this physical realm.  There is a look of sadness and resignation, nostalgia and regret that is not spoken but understood.  There are only rarely any moments of epiphany, those movie moments of sad good-byes or heartfelt apologies.  What you get instead is a person who is silently willing themselves to live.  And there is nothing wrong with that. Hope is a tangible thing when you are facing life and death struggles.  You eat it, you breathe it.  When it leaves you (and you know the moment it does) it knocks the wind out of you in a way you have never experienced before and you forget who you are and you forget that life is filled with grace.  You find it again, eventually, but the loss of hope is something you never forget.  What you do with that experience is part of the true test of living, of going on, and we all must do it in our own time, in our own way.
     For me, I learned what that experience meant to me when a friend of mine posted on her Facebook page that her husband was in need of a kidney donor.  He was about to start dialysis, a regimen he would continue daily for the rest of his life, until a suitable donor could be found.  Nobody in her family was able to donate and they were asking for help.  Having been through the experience of losing friend after friend after friend to illnesses for which there was no cure, I was struck by the fact that, in this case, there was most certainly something that could be done....not just to make him feel better.....but to save his life.  The gift that I would have given any of my other friends I had lost the last two years I could give to him.  I could keep that look from his eyes, I could keep him from losing hope and all that is wrapped up in that.  I felt no hesitation.  I did some reading, some research and called my friend and told her I would get tested for her husband.  The testing process, I now knew, could take months and I could back out at any time I felt I needed to, so I promised to start, not knowing where it might lead. 
     As I sat in the waiting room at the lab, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.  A bit battered and bruised from the fall, I understood that it was just a part of the process and I was sitting exactly in the right spot, comfortable now, resting, awaiting what might happen next.  The year before had been an incredible journey of discovery and living out my lifelong dreams.  Now I was going to take an unexpected road, cast aside my deepest fears and venture into a new part of life that included, hopefully, compassion and love and healing and.....life.  It was time for some happiness, time to see what might happen to those eyes of hopelessness when hope entered them again. I had a feeling it would be worth the bruises and the scars, but I had no idea that the greatest part of the journey was inside my own mind and heart.  That was, after all, where the scars of the last two years were deepest.  Maybe I could save two lives in the process.  I was willing to try anyway.  To me it seemed like an easy choice.