Undeserved and Unexpected

It caught me off guard. 

15 year old Clara had been asking me about her mother.  She wasn't even 2 years old when her mother passed away from leukemia.  "What was my mother like?"  "What was my mother like with me?"  She's asked these questions of everyone...and I know she's asking me to verify, in her mind, that what she's been told is really true. 

And then, the one she can't ask any of them.  "Tara, what is it like to be a bone marrow donor?" 

So I told her.  I told her how you get a letter, or a phone call, telling you that you're a potential match for a person of a certain age and gender, with a certain disease.  That you agree to more blood tests to confirm you're a match.  How the marrow program will tell you all you need to know about the collection procedures.  And how, when it's time to donate, all you really do is just show up and lay there.  You let them put the needles into you and you lay there for hours while a machine separates the needed stem cells from your whole blood and then returns everything else to you.  And then you get up, you go home, and...if you're me...you chase around the world's most active two year old the next day. 

It's really that easy.  Kind of embarrassingly so when you consider how much fanfare can happen when you tell people you're a donor.  Really.  You show up.  You lay there.  You go home.  It's painless. By the third time I donated for Clara's mother, Erin, it was unremarkable enough that I slept through most of it. 

What I didn't expect, though, was for Clara to jump out of her seat, to grab me in a hug tight enough to rival the one I got from her grandma Diane the first time I met them, and to say to me,

"Thank you for saving my mother's life." 

Because in the end, I didn't save Erin.  To be sure, the cells collected from my body bought them an extra 17 months from the first transplant.  It gave them time, it gave Erin enough time to know that Clara took her first steps and to hear Clara's first sentence, "Hi, Mama."  It wasn't enough time. 

Is there really such a thing as enough time with a loved one?

Shortly after Erin had passed away, a vicious and sadistic person...under the guise of friendship...told me that someday Clara might seek me out and ask me why I'd killed her mother.  I knew it wasn't rational when he said it, but it stuck in the back of my heart with the guilt of not having had cells strong enough to kick her cancer's ass.  For over 13 years, I wondered if, someday, Clara would blame me for her mother's death.  I know it wasn't rational.  I know her family would set her straight if she did.  But it was still a lingering thought and it worried me. 

There was a lot I didn't tell Clara about being a marrow donor.  I didn't tell her how freaked out I was the week before I donated the first time, terrified that I'd get sick and not be able to donate.  I didn't tell her how I desperately wanted to know more about her mother so that I could pray for them.  Or how I wept bitterly when I was called to donate a second...and then a third...time, knowing it didn't mean wonderful things for them.  Or how it had really seemed like NOTHING on my part right up until that first time I met them, thanks to friends we had in common who put the pieces together and allowed us to meet before the 1 year of anonymity was finished...that moment when her Grandma Diane grabbed me in a hug and wouldn't let go and kept saying, "Thank you, thank you, oh my God, thank you."  Or how, this past weekend, when I showed up at that same house I drove to 14 years ago, that Clara threw open the door and rushed to me with the same energy and manner her mother had on that first meeting.  It took my breath away. 

"Thank you for saving my mother's life." 

I didn't deserve it.  I didn't expect it.  But I absolutely needed to hear it. 

Read her mother's story here.
Read mine here.

And if you're in Michigan on Saturday, August 8, 2015, come join us here from 9am until noon.  If you're ages 18-44 and would like to join the marrow donor registry, I'll be there to help you join.