In Giving Life We Get Life

In 1970, on a lovely early summer day—the kind where light scents of lilac and early roses fill the air—as my mother and I walked along a sidewalk near our home in Cape May, a confused driver crashed into us pinning our bodies against a brick wall.  People rushed to help us, gently and speedily.  Ambulances were called, the hospital was at the ready, and we were quickly in operating rooms.  My mother was in critical condition and near death.  The surgeon made the difficult decision that to spare her life he would have to amputate her left leg at the thigh.  She was losing a great deal of blood and our small hospital’s supply of her fairly rare blood-type, A negative, had been depleted.  A call went out to our town’s Coast Guard base for help.  Immediately the few cadets and officers with her blood type came to her aid.  She needed a lot, but these young men were at the ready.  Thanks to the helpers and the health care professionals and the “Coasties”, eventually she began to recover.  Our lives never were the same, of course, but a new normal began to set in, slowly—very slowly.  She learned how to navigate with the drastic changes to her body and, of course, to her life.  Many years later, by complete chance, I met an ex-Coast Guard at a wedding in Cape May.  I told him the story of my mom, and with the intensity of emotion you don’t expect from a complete stranger he grabbed my hands.  I could see he was ready to cry.  He told me he was one of those men. As I looked at him in astonishment, he continued.  “The day we got the call I was at the lowest point in my life.  My father had committed suicide the year before and I had never dealt with that pain and what it did to my family.  I was drinking too much and I’d started gambling.  I didn’t know why I stayed in the Coast Guard but I didn’t know what else to do.  At 21 I thought my life was over.  Nothing mattered.  But then when we rushed to the hospital and they started drawing blood out of me I got this feeling…I don’t know how to describe it.  As they’re taking my blood I started feeling powerful.  Yeah, powerful, for the first time in a long time.  I was helping someone else live.  I was part, really part,  of something outside of me.  And your mother needed me to live.”  I was dumbfounded and just stared at him as he continued.  “Afterwards we all waited for days to hear how she was and when we got word that she was recovering well, we cheered.  I began to see that what I did had meaning to someone else—that I could help others live.  And that helping others is what gave my life purpose.”  When I was able to form words again I asked him what he was doing now.  “I’m a paramedic in Detroit.  Best job in the world.  Every day.”  I hugged him, this stranger who saved my mother, and I thanked him.  He spoke, “I gave her blood and she gave me a future.  This life we have,”  he continued, “it’s no good unless we share it.  We’re all in this world together, right?  We are all here for each other.  In giving life we get life.”

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