Unnatural Sounds

It’s a slow, grey afternoon. The highlight so far has been the discovery that my neighbor’s car door opener sounds identical to the input pad on my microwave oven. I was sitting at my desk, staring at my 5748th game of Snood (no lie, I took that directly off of the Snood score page) and idly wondering what my neighbor was nuking when I realized that there was no way I could possibly hear her kitchen noises from the other end of the building. I glanced out to see her removing grocery bags from her big black Suburban Attack Vehicle, and realized she had just popped open the hatch on that Black Moriah of hers. I’m sure there’s signficance in the congruety of sounds, but for the life of me I can’t think of what it might be.

I received an email from the local transplant organization, Gift of Life. One of the volunteers there, a heart recipient who has already written one book on the transplant experience, has apparently been contacted to write an article for a donor families newsletter. He’s requesting input from recipients for the article. Part of his email follows:

I’ve just accepted an assignment to write an article for a donor family newsletter titled: “Why I didn’t write…” that is intended to explain to donor families the many personal reasons they don’t hear from their transplant recipients after having donated a loved one’s organ for transplant.

If you are one of the many who have received an organ transplant and grappled with the effort to write that “perfect” note (of thank you or otherwise) to your donor family, I would love to receive your thoughts on why that note never got written (or at least hasn’t happened yet…) or maybe got written but never mailed. My intention, without using names, is to share with the donor family readership of this national newsletter some of the very personal experiences that resulted in their never getting any communications from their donors, maybe helping them understand the “why” behind this tender and sometimes very difficult subject.

I technically don’t qualify. I did write the donor family. I’ve been playing with sending him my experience of “Why I didn’t write again,” but I don’t think that fits in with the spirit of his article. There are times it sits heavily on me, that I made no effort to continue contact beyond the initial letter I sent out. But there was no healing in the experience, no sense of absolution that I lived when a young boy died; indeed, I lived because a yound boy died. Even just thinking about it is like picking at a scab sometimes. I owed the family some sense of peace and closure after their sacrifice, and after many long months I found a way to provide that. I don’t have what it takes to do what so many others have done though, maintaining a correspondence with the donor family, eventually meeting them face to face and forming a personal connection with them.

I had a small melt-down at work the end of last week. In no small part due to that, I have a building dread of going into work tomorrow. There’s been a proposed project occurring in another department, and the managers responsible for it have failed to communicate officially with me regarding any aspects. At first I was annoyed, since it concerned an area in which I have more expertise with than anyone else in the company. The more I learned about the project, though, the happier I was that I was not being brought in to assist. From what I heard, the project was a case of reinventing the wheel, starting with the question of what shape works best, trinagular, square or oblong. I objected to several aspects of the project on practical and ethical grounds, and let my immediate boss know of my concerns. I then made it my business to NOT make this project any of my business.

Which explains pretty fully why I was completely blindsided when I came in one morning late last week to an email summarizing the project, notifying me that it was to begin Monday, and listing me as the primary in charge of the specific area I had moral objections to. I called my boss and left her a message. My intent was to be stone-cold rational when she returned my call. Unfortunately, my frustration and rage didn’t quite permit that. Ever been so angry that you can’t kill the quiver in your voice? Ever been so frustrated that you kept gasping while talking, to keep from sobbing? Ever have your mind completely shut down on you because the effort to stay calm put the internal pressure gauges into the “red zone”? I can now state that I’ve “been there, done that”. If I didn’t need that paycheck and the goddamned health coverage, I’d like to think I’d have spent the weekending packing boxes and giving away my stores of staples and paperclips. Amazing what finances do to one’s moral backbone.

And I used to think I couldn’t be bought.