AN ORGAN DONATION EDUCATIONAL MOMENT Yesterday, I attended a LifeGift event celebrating Multicultural Awareness Month. One of the speakers said something that stayed with me. I’m paraphrasing, but the thought was essentially: “We come from different cultures. We speak different languages. But hope is the same for all of us.” Think about that in the context of organ donation. A donor and recipient may come from completely different worlds. Different cultures. Different languages. Different traditions. Different beliefs. Different life experiences. They may never have met. And yet, in one extraordinary moment, their stories become forever connected. The person whose heart now beats inside my chest may have experienced the world very differently than I do. I may never know. But I do know this: When my family and I were waiting for a heart, hope didn’t belong to a culture. It didn’t speak a particular language. It didn’t care where I came from. It was simply hope. And somewhere, in the mid...
What Remains The auction lasted most of the afternoon. People wandered through the old farmhouse carrying numbered paddles, pausing at tables covered with the ordinary evidence of a life. A cast-iron skillet. Boxes of Christmas ornaments. Books with someone’s name written inside the cover. A worn leather chair that had settled into the shape of its owner years before. By three o’clock, little colored stickers covered almost everything. SOLD. The furniture disappeared first. Then the dishes. The tools. The quilts. The grandfather clock that had stood in the hallway longer than anyone could remember. By sunset, the house echoed. The rooms looked strangely unfamiliar. As though the walls themselves had forgotten who had lived there. A young man stood alone in the empty living room. He had flown home for the auction after his grandmother died. He hadn’t expected to buy anything. He wasn’t really sure why he came. The auctioneer walked past him carrying a clipboard. “Looks like that’s about...