Instead, one evening in the hospital, he reached for my hand.
“Mom, I want to ask you something, and I need you to hear me before you say no.”
That warning alone made my stomach tighten.
He looked exhausted, but there was something unusually calm in his face.
“If they can use my heart when I’m gone, I want someone else to have it.”
I stared at him.
“Bryce, don’t.”
“Please.”
“You’re nineteen years old. We are still fighting this.”
“I know we are.”
“Then stop talking as if you’re already gone.”
He squeezed my fingers.
“I’m not giving up. But if we lose this fight, I don’t want everything to end with me. I already asked the doctor whether donation could be possible.”
That hurt almost more than the diagnosis.
He had been thinking about dying while I had been doing everything I could to pretend death was not coming.
“If I really have to leave,” he whispered, “I want something good to happen because I was here.”
I cried until I could barely speak, but eventually, I agreed.
Several weeks later, my son was gone.
His heart went to an eighteen-year-old girl.
I knew almost nothing about her.
Then, at Bryce’s funeral, a woman I had never seen before approached me.
She looked to be around my age, perhaps a little younger, and she was holding a cream-colored envelope with both hands.
“My name is Colleen,” she said quietly. “My daughter received your son’s heart.”
For the first time that afternoon, I truly looked at someone.
“Your daughter?”
She nodded.
Then she held out the envelope.
“Bryce asked me to give this to you.”
I recognized his handwriting before I even touched it.
My hands began shaking as I opened the envelope.
The first line made my breath catch.
“Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”
I looked up at Colleen.
“What does that mean?”
She hesitated.
“Please read the rest when you get home.”
“You know what’s in here?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me.”
Her eyes filled with something I couldn’t understand.
