A Life Everlasting (10 page)

What started as Ducat's dream has transformed into a major resource for the scientific community. (She turned NDRI over in 2012 to Bill Leinweber, who came to the organization with more than twenty-five years' experience advocating for medical
research.) NDRI now offers a catalogue of more than seven thousand biological specimens—collected from donors from more than 160 organ-procurement organizations, tissue banks, eye banks, and hospitals—and distributes nearly thirty thousand specimens annually to over five hundred academic, pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical-device organizations.

Donors don't even have to be deceased. NDRI also facilitates donations of tissue from surgery, such as tumors, or diseased organs such as lungs and livers that have been replaced with transplants.

The next week, I received two more letters. The first was forwarded to me from Immanuel Rasool, the manager of Research Donations at WRTC, who had received it from Cytonet in Durham, North Carolina.

Please extend our gratitude and condolences to the family of your donor, a baby boy, for their willingness to give someone else the Gift of Life through research.

Also, please thank your staff for everything they did to provide the opportunity of liver research to the baby's family.

The process gave us a viability of 52.2% with 12.94 billion cells counted. The cells were not of the best quality and the viability was borderline. There were areas noted on the liver of pooled blood that looked like bruising. The remaining tissue was utilized in our lab for additional testing and research to assist in developing a better outcome for future cases.

Once again, thank you to everyone involved at WRTC and the hospital and especially the family of this precious baby boy.

The next letter, from Old Dominion Eye Foundation, didn't include any additional information, just a sincere thank you and some grief materials. And the next, from WRTC in May, included a butterfly pin as a token of appreciation and remembrance.

And that was it. No more information, no more updates about what my son was doing, about whether his donations were having or would have an impact. So I did what I guess I was expected to do.

I got on with living.

Callum was an easy baby: he started sleeping through the night as soon as I went back to work. I think Ross and I were more laid-back than many first-time parents, perhaps because of what we'd gone through in the pregnancy. Problems that our fellow parents complained about—the cost and scarcity of quality day care, breast-feeding, pediatrician appointments, and nap schedules—didn't even register as real issues to us. We had a beautiful, healthy child with a completely formed skull. We were freaking delighted.

One of the things we worked hard at doing was maintaining our pre-baby lifestyle as much as possible while simply easing Callum into it. So, we brought him with us when we went out to dinner or traveled; by the time he was two years old, he had flown across the Atlantic and back three times to visit Ross's family in Scotland. Ross still played on his rugby team and went to the pub at seven o'clock in the morning to watch Glasgow Celtic and the Scottish national soccer team. I picked up my graduate school studies at American University; I had four classes to go to get my master's degree in public communications.

In one class, we had been asked to give a presentation about the challenges of surveys; I did mine on my experience
of filling out the survey for the Duke anencephaly study. Using PowerPoint slides that included photos of Thomas and Callum, I explained to the class what had made me a motivated participant (it meant my child's death was not in vain) and where the pitfalls had been (embarrassing questions; the burden of things like getting blood draws; needing favors from busy medical staff). It turned out the exercise of making my experience the subject of a presentation was therapeutic; it was the first time I was able to discuss what had happened at a remove. It was starting, very slowly, to become a piece of my history rather than as something I was going through every minute of every day.

During those first few months, I made the mistake of thinking that because the worst thing had already happened—my child had died—I was immune from anything bad happening again, at least for a while. But life doesn't work like that.

When my favorite coworker announced she was leaving her job, I went home and cried. I guess that from the outside it might not seem like a big deal, but it felt enormous to me at the time. When I pulled myself together, I realized that life would continue to throw me curveballs. Life was not singling me out for the bad, or the good. It was just life. I remembered some passages from
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
. Mother Teresa, one of the nicest people I could think of, still had bad things happen to her. Being nice, or having one terrible thing happen to you, doesn't provide an invisible force field that shields you from the normal ups and downs of life. You can't control things that way.

My family was devastated when my stepfather, Bob, unexpectedly died of a heart attack in December 2010, only nine months after Thomas passed away. We're not a very religious family, and we didn't belong to a church, so we asked Phil
Brooks to perform the service, and Bob was buried in the same cemetery as Thomas.

As we approached the one-year anniversary of Thomas's death, I found myself caring more and more about what had happened with his donations. I decided to contact Old Dominion Eye Foundation to see if they had any follow-up information, so I sent them an email. I got the following response:

—————Forwarded message—————

From: Christina Jenkins

Date: Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 12:56 PM

Subject: RE: Contact Request From ODEF Website

To: Sarah Gray

Ms. Gray,

Thomas' donated eyes were used as part of research program at the Schepens Eye Research Institute. . . . [Schepens is] involved in many valuable research studies conquering diseases of the eye. We all know someone who has been touched with these debilitating diseases. Please take comfort in knowing that countless individuals are being helped with his donation and that their renewed vision is a legacy left by your son. I offer my deepest sympathies as you approach the one-year anniversary of Thomas' passing.

Sincerely,

Christina Jenkins

Once I'd finished reading the note, I Googled “Schepens,” and was delighted to see that the institute was part of Harvard Medical School.

Thomas Ethan Gray had gotten into Harvard.

On the first anniversary of Thomas's death, we visited his grave. When we buried him a year earlier, his small plot had been on the outer row of this small cluster of lost babies. Because his tombstone was not ready at the time, a brass stake with a typed paper sign had designated his space. He had been the newest addition to his row.

Now, a year later, his permanent tombstone was in place, and the grass had grown over some, but newer graves surrounded his, each with a new brass stake. For some reason, I expected that Thomas's grave would be the last. It still seemed so recent to me. How is it that so many more babies had died since last year?

Ross and I touched Thomas's tombstone, brushed off the dust, and left him some flowers. A breeze made the chimes in the nearby trees sound softly, as though to acknowledge our presence. With the tinkling sound all around us, we turned and walked away.

A few weeks later, we attended WRTC's annual donor-family gathering, which is held every spring in memory of those who have “given the gift of life.”

We had been invited to contribute a square to the annual WRTC donor quilt. The tradition had begun in 1995 as a memorial to donors. The quilts hang in the WRTC offices, but they also travel to community meetings, health fairs, press conferences, and informational presentations around Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Thomas's quilt was the fifteenth such quilt, and it would be unveiled at a service at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC. His square comprised several photos of Thomas and Callum and one photo of Thomas solo, Ross's left hand covering his tiny chest. (Revered newsman Tim Russert, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2008, was also a donor, and has a square on WRTC's thirteenth
quilt. His gave a shout-out to his beloved Buffalo Bills and to
Meet the Press
, the program he'd moderated on NBC for many years.) The gathering was attended by donor families, recipients, transplant surgeons, WRTC staff, and other people from the transplant community, and was followed by a lovely reception.

I was especially moved by a poem that was written and delivered by Dr. James Selby Jr., a heart and two-time kidney recipient. It was a poem called “You,” and it was dedicated to his organ donor. It began with the words:

I remember when I first found out,

that my organs were coming from you.

A sense of happiness filled my heart,

however there was a feeling of sadness too.

For me to live,

you had to die.

While my family rejoiced,

your family cried.

I thought about the researchers who received Thomas's organs.

Just as so many people are touched by the gift of an organ for transplant, I figured someone out there must have been touched by Thomas's donation for research. Who received the package with Thomas's liver? Did they wonder about him or his family? Is it weird to open a package that contains the eyes of a fellow member of the human race? How many packages do they open per year, or per day? Was there a crowd of eye researchers rejoicing with its arrival? Or was it stored on a shelf, collecting dust?

Although the counseling had been helpful, it wasn't the only thing I needed. I was looking for some kind of peace. I thought that perhaps I should try a psychic; I don't believe in
them, but I was curious, and wanted something or someone to give me perspective on my loss.

My sister-in-law Julia went to a psychic called Kizzy, in Glasgow, in 2012. Julia reported in an email that Kizzy had told her that Thomas was “at peace and with his own people and was looking after his wee bro,” that Thomas “had to go to let Callum live and he knew from the beginning that he didn't have long. . . . He waited to meet the family and make sure Callum was OK and he was at peace when he died with all his family around him.”

On the second anniversary of the twins' birth, I sent an update to the twins' medical team, with a photo of Callum and a précis of what the psychic had said. Phil Brooks wrote back:

In your last email you had mentioned what a psychic had said . . . and I had a similar experience but have hesitated to share it with you. Maybe a phone chat would be better.

By total coincidence, Phil—a spiritually open-minded person—occasionally speaks to a psychic named Claudia Coronado in Sedona, Arizona, to “get clarity on issues.” It just so happened, he told me, that in a meeting with her in September 2009, when I was pregnant, she told him that “there were two souls waiting to enter the world that I [i.e., Phil] would be deeply involved with. She indicated they were looking forward to meeting me, but there was one who was going to need me especially.” Phil had no idea what she was referring to, not even when he met us at the twins' birth.

I was so grateful for the care I had received from the hospital staff, including my doctors, some nurses, and the chaplain, that I wrote a letter to the hospital CEO, and recognized each
person for his or her contribution. As a result, these hospital employees were selected to receive an Inova Service Legends Award.

When Callum was six months old, we attended the awards ceremony. Phil asked if he could hold Callum, who had been fussing. As soon as Phil picked him up, Callum looked into his eyes and put his head on Phil's shoulder. He didn't do that with anyone else. Phil said to him, “Do you remember me?” Callum lifted his head up and looked into Phil's eyes again, then put his head back down on his shoulder. Phil thought,
I believe that some part of him knows me
. And it was then that he remembered his conversation with Claudia the psychic, though it would take him some time to tell us about it.

On the second anniversary of Thomas's death, in March 2012, I called Claudia Coronado for a reading of my own. When I asked Claudia what she charged, she said she didn't because she couldn't guarantee that she'd be able to contact the right people.

“Thomas has appeared to you before, right?” Claudia said. I told her he hadn't.

“He's a golden light,” she said, as though I had answered in the affirmative. “He will appear to his brother. If his brother says he's talked to him, believe him.”

I nodded into the phone and let her continue.

“Thomas's role now is like a teacher; he helps people who have just come to the other side. He welcomes them and makes them feel comfortable and makes sure that they know that everything is okay there.”

Even though it sounded like a bunch of baloney, I still found it comforting to picture him in this role. I guess I wanted it to be true.

“He will also make sure that your family is okay financially.”

The lottery ticket I wrote to him about?

“You'll be having another baby, a girl. And I see the girl bringing a boy with her.”

Claudia asked me if there was anyone else I might like to learn about.

I told her my stepfather had died just a few months earlier.

“I see him. He's saying, ‘But . . . but . . . but . . . that's it?' He is struggling to accept his fate.”

She said that Thomas was there to calm people like my stepfather who were unsettled by their own death.

“Your mother will get married again to a nice man.”

(Three years later, she would do so, but when Claudia made this prediction, my mother hadn't even met him.)

Whether any of it was true or not, the way Claudia described Thomas made me imagine him as a mature adult with a job. Even more, it made me think he was in the right place, especially when his time on earth hadn't seemed to suit him at all.