Where to Begin

Tending to Endings (sixty-nine)

It was our second day in the little house in Salt Lake, where John and I moved to be close to the transplant center while waiting for John to hopefully be called in for a liver transplant. His MELD score would go up on September 29 due to his cancer diagnosis, making it far more likely that he would get called. Still, it would likely be a month or two, we were told, maybe longer.

We arrived with a trailer filled with our work stations, clothes for all seasons, the mattress from our own comfy bed, piles of books for my seminary coursework and a few extras just-in-case. We held out hope for making it home by the holidays, but it was a slim hope.

John and I were told to stay within an hour drive of the transplant center and to answer every call from every area code. I told friends that for me, the waiting was going to be the hardest part. Yes the months of testing and procedures to get John on the list were stressful and all-consuming, but at least I knew what to do. Now we were entering this unknown stage where a call could come at any moment or not at all. All there was to do while my husband’s life was on the line was wait.

And yes, to live while we were waiting, but even that was a strange task, uprooted as were were from our community and home and not certain of how long we would be in this unfamiliar place.

The second evening in Utah, just as I logged off Zoom where in my History of Modern Theology course we had been discussing Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher — Is religion morality at its core, or is it, at its essence, a feeling, an experience of the Divine? — I heard John’s phone ring just outside and his hello. He had walked into the backyard of the little house, I would learn later, to snap a photo of the clouds over the mountains at sunset.

A pause and then, This is John, and there was something in his voice—hope? surprise? fear?—something that made me stand and head toward the door, thinking, Already?

When I opened the side door, John was right there about to come in. He pointed to the receiver, wide-eyed, nodding.

All that happened since that call is a story I will be writing for a long time. The very short version is that, as of October 1 at about 1:30 in the morning, John has a new-to-him liver and is cancer-free, cirrhosis-free, and very much alive.

John was released from the hospital four days after surgery, and we attended follow-up appointments at the transplant center twice weekly for the next three weeks, and then were told we could head home to Idaho. We happily hauled all those unworn winter clothes back to Boise on October 26.

John still gets blood draws each week and takes an array of medications each day, and we are back to pandemic level protocols during these first months while his immune system is knocked down to the ground floor. But, he is doing exceptionally well. At his latest appointment in Boise, Alyssa, the transplant P. A. said John was definitely an outlier based on how well he is accommodating the new (to him) liver and how fast he is healing. She also confirmed that he really does have to wait until at least January to play tennis so that his abdominal muscles fully heal.

Transplant has profound physical, emotional, moral, and spiritual implications. I knew this going in, but now it is a more textured knowing. Ours is only one experience of many (there were ~9000 liver transplants in the U.S. last year), but it gave me a glimpse into a world I had not seen up close.

One of the reasons I haven’t come here to write all this down sooner is all that complexity. Also, I don’t even know where to begin to acknowledge the grace that showed up in seen and unseen ways, and it feels important to start there. John and I are grateful beyond measure for the help we have received from that first moment we learned that he had cancer in February, all the way to now. Grace that showed up as exceptional medical care and generous housing help and food on our porch and handwritten notes in the mail and heartfelt prayers and people caring for so many parts of our lives that we dropped to tend to this.

It will be a long time before I am able to sift through (and maybe write) about the many strands of this experience that make it whole. But there was a moment the night of the transplant that feels important to attempt to capture here in a blog I’ve been writing for almost three years now about endings.

We were in the hospital room and John was prepped for surgery, but we didn’t know yet whether he was going to get a liver that night. We knew the donor was out-of-state and was scheduled to be taken off life support at ten pm. Then there was a window of time for a number of events to occur that included waiting for a heart to stop beating and a liver to be flown back to Utah.

That night, while we waited to learn whether the surgery was truly a go, I though about the times I have been in that other room while a loved one was taken off life support. It had been twice now, with two dear friends, each too young to die, that a small group of us gathered close and did our best to love someone through the end part of her story in a strange hospital room, under heart-breaking circumstances. 

And it came to me and I said to John, “No matter what happens with that liver, that other family is having a terrible night.”

“I’ve been thinking of them all day,” John said quietly. “Something that always get’s me is all the people I don’t even know working on my behalf.”

The place to begin of course is gratitude to the human who checked that box on their driver’s license application or wrote it into their advanced directive or told their spouse they wanted to be an organ donor. And then, to the circle of loved ones who did the very hard work of seeing that wish through.

That night in our room, John and I prayed, and wept, and talked a little but not much. Mostly we waited. We ate hospital jello and texted with our kids and eventually watched the latest episode of The Rings of Power on my laptop. After midnight, John was brought down to surgery.

I often know when I’m standing on the cusp of something big, but hardly ever how the story will go. I don’t know what will be the hardest part. Or the best. What will be sloughed off and what will be carried forward. What will be ending and what will be birthed or re-birthed or just plain borne.

But I always know, these days at least, that I am not alone.

With gratitude and love,

Laura

Feel free to comment below or send your thoughts or questions or ideas for future installments to laura@lstavoevoe.com.

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