Loss, Gratitude and Humility

This year, September 26th came and went like any other day. Any other day, that is, with an imprint of loss and life. For September 26th is my Transplantaversary.

In years past, especially the first couple of years, the fifth year, and the tenth year, there was a marking of time not unlike a birthday. In many ways, this date is somehow more important to me, for I don’t specifically remember my own birth (yet I have the film footage to prove it, but that is a different story).

This year, however, I woke up to a bad start - I accidentally shrank a new woolen jumper, and blamed myself harshly. It wasn’t just the jumper, though. No one in my family remembered what day it was, and thus started the day’s double negative belief cycle: I can’t do anything right, and I don’t matter.

After working through the morning, relieved to be focused on other people’s pains rather than my own, I took myself to the pool and completed my swim with some time floating in the water. With my heels fixed to the side of the pool and my torso floating in the water, I closed my eyes, and envisioned that day, twelve years ago. My memory took me back to the day before the transplant, when my donor died, and my phone rang at 10:40pm. I remember the words through the earpiece well.

“Am I speaking to Elizabeth Reumont? Lizzie, we think we have a donor. Please come to the hospital as soon as you can.”

My three and a half year old son was asleep in the room next door, my mother at a hotel around the corner, as luck would have it, she was visiting from the US.

I remember calling my mother, and letting her know I was getting a taxi to the hospital, where I was then admitted, tagged on every wrist and ankle, and given a bed for the night.

My mother arrived at 3am, having snuck herself into the ward and into my bed. She held me for those last four hours, in what seemed like an eternity. During that time, I imagined a stranger’s organ, on ice, and the cavernous body that lay somewhere in a morgue, without it. I conjured up an amorphous image of the person, but what was not vague, was the loss being experienced by their loved ones, and all those left behind. I saw sadness and weeping, grieving and loss. In that moment, I experienced it as my own.

The expression, ‘they died so I could live’ is trite, considering a lifetime of love and connections that came to an end on that day, as mine was readying to, had I not received this great gift from a stranger.

But back to the pool. As I continued to float and connect to the sound of my underwater breathing, I was on the operating table. The light beyond my eyelids envisioned the surgeons, one with a scalpel, making the first incision. A part of me was being excised, removed for good. What followed in reality was hours of stress for the surgeons, who together did their best to fit a square peg into a round hole. I have been told many times of the challenges they faced, like trying to plumb together two very different size and shape appliances that are, in fact, incompatible. I’ve been told about the celebration in theatre when twelve hours and 120 staples later, I was wheeled into the ICU. But on this day, today, my experience was about loss.

The truth is, I do not know how many more years of transplantaversaries I have before me, or whether I will need another transplant in the future. None of us knows our fate, and by most accounts, we go through life taking our body and our breath for granted. This day, each year for me, represents gratitude and humility.

I would like it also to represent a loss of the old belief system, and an acceptance for who I am. After the gift I gave myself earlier in the day (and many days before) ‘I can’t do anything right and I don’t matter’, I was, in fact, given a real gift. I ran into a woman whom I worked with several years back at the market. We hugged each other and she gave me an update on her ankle we’d been working with, through touch and movement to heal. And then, unexpectedly, tears filled her eyes. “You are such an inspiration to me”, she said sheepishly, embarrassed for the tears. I was taken aback, as this show of emotion was hardly expected with our chance encounter. She continued, “You manage to find the time to be creative, you do so many things even when you are busy helping people. I wish I could be like that.” We parted ways with warmth, me with a little spring in my step. In that brief meeting, I had gotten the validation I needed. I was left reflecting about how easily I punished myself earlier in the day, despite the many years of therapy and work with my belief system. As great as it was to be validated by someone else, what matters most is that I matter to myself. I also see the progress, because on many, many days I do.

Happy Transplantaversary, Dear Lizzie. I’m grateful you are alive.