Prologue
Emily thought she'd never stop crying. She and her mother held each other closely while the doctors pushed this button then that. The priest had said a prayer. It all happened in a whirlwind.
Emily looked at the body of her father, almost unrecognizable with tubes and an IV and a mask over his face. After the doctors had "pulled the plug," their words, they got to work quickly, wheeling away her father's body very fast. Emily touched her father's arm as he was taken from the room. The doctors had work to do.
It seemed like Paige's mother never stopped crying. Paige honestly couldn't remember a lot. She often woke up completely forgetting where she was, and why everything always smelled so sterile. But the one thing she always remembered was that her mom was always crying. In between drifting in and out of consciousness, Paige would wonder how a person could cry that much. She was always scared her mom would dehydrate. All that crying. She always meant to tell her mom to stop crying, but she was always too tired to say much of anything.
Sometimes, Paige would look down at her arms and not really recognize the color of her skin.
The memories seemed distant, another life, really. Her skin sun-kissed and glowing. Her shoulders had terrible bathing suit tan lines, but she didn't care.
But when she'd wake up lately, her skin didn't look like her own anymore. Calling it a color was a disservice to actual colors. It was more of an tone. A grey tone. Ash colored, maybe. No pigment. Probably because Paige could barely remember the last time she spent more than a minute out in the sun.
These moments of clarity were thankfully few and far between. Paige didn't know if she could handle having these longing thoughts too often. Wanting her old life back, before her kidney disease had progressed this far.
The progression had honestly been slow. A routine test in middle school led to more testing that led to more doctors giving her sympathetic looks and her mom crying, only when she was alone in her bedroom. She didn't think Paige could hear it, but she could.
The crying started to become more frequent, and her mom couldn't hide it anymore. Or maybe she just stopped trying.
The sympathetic looks from her doctors led to suggestions of seeing a specialist. It was a word her mom hoped to never hear again. "I'm going to give you the name of a nephrologist that I think will be able to help."
Paige saw her mom's shoulders tense at the word. She was only 12, but she recognized the fear in her mother's eyes immediately.
Things were normal for a while. Sure, Paige started to get weaker and weaker. But maybe it was just puberty. Her mom was still crying, but maybe she was just sad about her dad.
The self-imposed ignorance of her youth was a beautiful thing for a few months.
Paige started forgetting things and she started to hurt, physically. It was probably just growing pains. Teenagers had growing pains all the time. Teenagers grew. That's why they had a name... growing pains.
Paige made sure she didn't mention the forgetting things to her mom. It would just make her cry more. And Paige really wasn't sure how a person could cry that much.
Paige was never allowed to go to high school. She had a tutor. Her mom made sure she had the best tutor.
The trips to the doctor, sorry - the nephrologist - got too frequent to ignore what the future had in store.
Her mom cried a lot the day the doctor suggested dialysis for Paige. "There are two kinds and I think both would be appropriate for you, and I want us to talk about what your options are and how this will effect your life before we make any decisions. But a decision will need to be made," the nephrologist looked from Paige and her mom, down to Paige's medical charts. "Soon," he emphasized.
Paige and her mom drove home after that visit and Paige went to her room to study and her mom went into her room to cry.
She had to remind herself not to feel guilty. That's what her therapist told her to focus on. Her illness wasn't her fault. Her father's death wasn't her fault. Paige cannot feel guilt about her mom's depression. Her mom only wanted to help. She wanted desperately to help. And when you're a woman who married the love of her life, and had a perfect baby daughter and your husband dies after battling chronic kidney disease and now your daughter develops the same disease less than a year later, it was a lot for a woman to handle.
Paige knew the reason her mother felt intense guilt and sadness was because she couldn't help her daughter. Her mom had donated a kidney to help save her father. It didn't take. Her father died. Now she was sick, and Paige's mom had no kidney to spare.
When she first got sick, Paige heard her mother arguing with her doctor. Her mother never raised her voice to anyone. Let alone a virtual stranger in the doctor. Her mom blew up on the doctor when she suggested she donate her other kidney to Paige, and go on dialysis herself.
"It doesn't work like that, Nicole," the doctor said gently.
"Well it fucking should!" her mom screamed, loud enough for the whole waiting room to hear.
Paige's teenage years were her loneliest. For a long time, the dialysis helped and she felt healthy. She looked healthy. Sure dialysis was a pain, and took forever and it physically drained her. But she had good days. And she was a teenage girl. And she wanted to date and she wanted to go to school and make friends and make fun of teachers and go to parties, just like she saw other kids her age do in movies and on TV.
But it wasn't safe and after being too sick for so long before the dialysis, she didn't really have many friends. Plus, Paige's mom would just cry when she'd suggest maybe joining a band or a club at the YMCA or something. So eventually Paige stopped asking.
In her early teenage years, Paige had a lot of down time. Hours and hours. The tutoring only took a few hours a day, and it happened when she'd get dialysis so she'd have the whole afternoon and night free. During that time, Paige would read and learn instruments and teach herself to knit and listen to music.
But then things started to get bad again. Dialysis needed to go on for longer, and longer, and longer until Paige wasn't sure there would be enough hours in the day for it. Her "good days" became less frequent. Some days, she couldn't find the strength to get out of bed. Then some days became most days. Then most days became all days.
And then they just started taking more and more bags into the hospital room, because they knew they wouldn't be leaving it for a while. And her mom would only leave her bedside to cry in the bathroom. Then she stopped leaving her bedside to cry.
Some days, Paige couldn't move because her joints hurt so bad.
The ringing phone took both her and her mom by surprise. It was a particularly bad day when it rang. Her mom hadn't stopped crying, and hadn't let go of her hand, and her skin was particularly ashy. Paige had started wondering what was even the point of fighting anymore? What did she have to look forward to? It was the start of summer, she was a teenager and she couldn't even go outside and enjoy the sun. She couldn't leave the hospital because she might get sick, and her body couldn't fight off an infection right now.
For the first time in her 5 years of battling kidney disease, Paige let herself lose hope.
But the ringing phone changed that.
Paige couldn't really hear what her mom was saying, it sounded like she was in a tunnel, even though her mom was right next to her. She just knew once her mom started smiling. She hadn't seen her mom smile in years.
Paige knew instantly.
As soon as her mom hung up the phone, Paige said, "I want to go to school."
The effects were immediate. It's amazing how quickly your body can recover after it gets an upgrade to its filtration system.
Paige looked alive again. Her skin was glowing, just glowing. And it was the color of skin again. Her eyes, which had started to look hollow and distant.. now looked clear and bright. Two days after her surgery, Paige could stand up. A week after her surgery, Paige could walk to the bathroom by herself and actually use it.
Her mom cried less and less. And there were days, when she was home from the hospital, that she forgot she was ever sick.
She was healthy. It felt weird. She couldn't remember the last time she was healthy. It would take a lot of adjustment, but luckily, she had her whole summer to get used to it before school started up again.
The doctors don't let the donor's family and the patient meet unless both sides want to. The donor's family didn't want to. But Paige was filled with gratitude and guilt and it's hard to express that in a letter, but it was her only option.
Sometime around July, Paige finally found the right words. The blank piece of paper stared at her for weeks. Then one day, the words finally arrived.
She didn't know anything about her donor, the doctors don't tell. And part of her didn't want to know at first. The simple truth was she was alive today because someone else was dead. Someone else died and their family was mourning their death, but Paige was alive.
Paige started the hardest letter she'd ever have to write.
"I don't know who I am writing to, but I want to say I am so sorry for your loss. There are no words in situations like this. Halmark doesn't make a greeting card for it. All I can do is humbly say thanks to your loved one's selflessness, my mom has stopped crying. She has cried for too many years, and it's good to see her smile. I am sorry that my second chance at life had to come at your sadness. But I promise to use this second chance as a real opportunity. I will not waste it. I will make sure to live a life your loved one would be proud of."
