The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney

I did not understand. That is the truth of that moment. I stood there in my mother’s veil and I could not make the words mean anything. Eli gave me a kidney. Eli, who I had met over a shoebox of receipts, Eli of the bad coffee, Eli who I had courted for a year and a half. My anonymous donor was a stranger I would never meet. The program had told me so. I had written a letter to a man with no name. These two things could not both be Eli. My mind would not let them be the same man.

I turned and looked at him, and the look on Eli’s face told me the whole thing before he said a word. He had gone white. And he was not looking at his sister with surprise. He was looking at the floor with the face of a man whose deepest secret has just been dragged into the light in the worst possible place, and I knew, I knew the way you know a thing in your body before your mind catches up, that it was true.

For a second nobody moved. Maureen stood there with her chin up, sure she had done a righteous thing, sure she had saved her brother from a woman who did not deserve him. My mother had her hand over her mouth. Two hundred people held their breath.

And then Eli did the bravest thing I have ever seen a shy man do. He turned away from me, away from the pastor, and he faced that whole church, and he started to talk, and his voice shook at the start and then it did not.

“My sister’s got it half right,” he said. “I did give the kidney. I’m not ashamed of that part. I’ll tell you how it happened, since it’s out now, and then Delia can decide what she wants to do, and I’ll live with it either way.”

He took a breath. “Our mother died waiting for a kidney. Some of you remember. I was nineteen. She was on the list four years and it never came, and I watched her go down a little at a time, and I decided back then, young and dumb as I was, that if I ever got the chance I would give one of mine to somebody, so some other family wouldn’t have to sit by a bed and watch. I didn’t do it for years. You get busy, you tell yourself later, later. And then one winter I just did it. I drove up to the university and I signed the papers and I gave it to the program. To nobody. To whoever needed it. I didn’t want to know who got it. That was the whole point. You don’t give a gift and then stand there waiting to be thanked. That’s not a gift. That’s a purchase.”