At work, the headline flashed through my social media feed: “Man with incredible beard in desperate need of kidney.”
I closed a tab of political chatter and read the heartbreaking plea. The wife of the man with the incredible beard asked the universe to send her someone who would donate a kidney and save her husband’s life.
“And so, dear friends and strangers (whom this would kindly be),” she wrote, “we need a kidney. It’s unbelievably wild to ask for.”
I didn’t know either, but I clicked ‘share’, just like I do when the local animal shelter is looking for adopters, or when someone is raising money for people affected by a natural disaster. Would the stars conspire and answer this call?
Maybe or maybe not. Anyway, I felt like I had done my part. I was 34, living in downtown Philadelphia, and in all my years on this planet I had only been hospitalized once when I left my mother’s womb. However, my friend David, with whom I shared an apartment, was the type to report to the ICU because of a toothache.
It was easy for me to collect all the reasons why I was not an ideal living donor candidate. I was in an existential rut like the one I had been in as a university student years earlier when I met the psychiatrist and philosopher Dr. Viktor Frankl studied. At the time, I had frequently thrown unanswered questions at the other students, such as, “I mean, really, what’s the point?”
Paired with my chosen attire—black slacks and a ribbed onyx turtleneck sweater—all that was missing was the cigarette and a beret. Towards the end of the semester, I decided that I would not go back my senior year. I moved to a small beach town and reread Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” on the beach with the seagulls.
However, with what I’ve been feeling lately, I started to think that it wasn’t existential fear that was haunting me – I was just unhappy in my relationship. Deep down, I still loved David, but more than once arguments with him had caused pillows to fly off the couch.
“I’m moving to Italy!” I would scream, back from a recent trip there.
“Fine!” he would say. “Go crush grapes in Tuscany!”
Of course, I wasn’t destined to live as a self-employed wealthy winemaker in the Chianti countryside, but I was still weary in my job as an executive assistant in the hospitality industry. It was my belief that I was on my way to greater things; I just hadn’t figured out what those things were yet.
The pattern stayed the same all summer and fall: I went to work, came home, imagined I was somewhere else. David and I spent part of our September vacation on the coast, sitting on the sand, watching the tide roll in and out, trying to put in what was missing.
Finally November arrived and with it my mother’s birthday. She decided to celebrate with her best friend at a spa in the Poconos, and left Kenny, my stepdad, home alone for a few days. Kenny had undergone a series of spinal surgeries over the past year, so I volunteered to walk their 140-pound French Mastiff every night until my mom returned later that week.
I arrived at a dark house around 5pm and Kenny was lying on the couch, unable to sit up from the pain.
“Julia?” he cried. “Is that you?”
That’s when the little voice we sometimes hear—the little voice that has more right than wrong—came through, soft at first but louder: “Something is very wrong.”
It took some convincing, but Kenny eventually agreed to go to the emergency room, where we learned he was in septic shock.
“It’s the kind of infection that accelerates quickly,” the doctor said. It had attached itself to the hardware in his back and spread throughout his body in a matter of weeks. “He would have been dead in 24 hours if you hadn’t brought him in.”
Kenny immediately underwent several surgeries, almost flat on the operating table. My mom and I were living in a fog, white-knuckled through most of his more life-threatening procedures and taking Ativan when we couldn’t take it anymore.
Then the flashbacks of my father’s death began.
Standing in the upstairs bathroom of my apartment, I looked at myself in the mirror, my eyes and head pounding in strange concord. I saw myself sitting in the car with my father at the age of 16. He had just picked me up from my job as a restaurant hostess and we made the 10 minute drive back to our house. My father was not a man of many words, and I can remember countless rides with him that remained silent, including this last one.
As we pulled into our driveway, I ran in, closed my bedroom door, and went to bed. The next morning I got dressed, ate some cereal and left for school without saying goodbye. It was early in the day when I was called out of class and asked to take my things to the principal’s office, where my mother’s colleague picked me up and delivered the news on the way to the hospital: “I know not how to tell this. Your father is dead.”
He was only 46 and had suffered a sudden cardiac arrhythmia. In previous years he had been unemployed and took on the role of stay at home father. I can’t say he did well; an injury prevented him from doing the physical work he loved, which was carpentry and furniture making. But every morning he cooked breakfast for me and my brother, drove us to school and did all the shopping. Yet he often seemed aimless, watching TV alone or staring out at the backyard.
Kenny slowly started to heal from the infection, and I thought about that stranger who needed a kidney, and I heard that little voice again: “Maybe I’m the person the plea was for.”
It was now December. Almost six months had passed since I saw the post. I decided to get tested as a potential donor and found that I was a promising match for the man with the incredible beard. I then navigated through all the obstacles: fear expressed by David and relatives, endless physical and mental examinations, the uncertainty of having one kidney in the future.
Yet it was the Covid-19 pandemic that thwarted our original March 2020 surgery date. For months it was unclear when we could make a new appointment, or if the recipient would survive the wait. But by the end of July, I was recovering in the hospital, sedated but sleepy, celebrating a successful transplant.
“It’s unbelievable,” said my surgeon at my bedside. “As soon as your kidney attaches, it immediately started producing urine. We rarely see results like that.”
There is room for the possibility that my problem was never an existential rut, or travel recordings, or problems in my relationship. Perhaps it was an inner void that the loss of my father could not fill, which was deepened by the guilt and shame I have felt for 21 years.
A long lasting pain in the darkness of wishing I’d done something more, said something more, been something more before my father left us. I was desperate for purpose in this world, longing for an escape, but ignored what was at its root: the need for love. My father’s love, and ultimately love for myself.
Donating a kidney – giving away a piece of yourself – gives us so much. It brought me closer to my father. It helped me understand his own struggle to find meaning. And while so much has gone unsaid between us, the loss has irrefutably shaped who I am. I am proud to carry that part of him with me forever.
In Judaism, there is something called “bashert,” a Yiddish word that David’s sister once explained to me. “Bashert,” she said, “is the belief that there are events that are meant for a higher force to take place in the universe. What is meant to be.”
I suppose some might compare it to fate, and some might say this is the life you’re headed for. If I was back in Psych class, we’d be discussing Frankl’s theory: that it’s not the meaning of life in general that gives us depth, but the specific meaning at a specific moment of one’s life. I never thought that donating an organ and saving the life of a stranger would give so much meaning to my own life. How removing something internal would help fill that void.
And maybe it was never a search for meaning. It was instead a creation—not just for my own life, but for my father’s as well.