Love, real love, spends its final strength making sure you’re taken care of after it’s gone. Mark was dying, and terrified, and grieving the daughter he’d never hold — and instead of spending his last weeks in fear, he spent them arranging. A heartbeat for a child who’d never meet him. A heart for a child who’d die without him. He turned his own death into two gifts for two little girls, and he did it quietly, in secret, so that the doing of it wouldn’t cost me one more hour of grief while he was alive. That’s not something death defeats. A man who spends his dying breath making sure two children have a future has beaten death at the only thing that matters.
My husband became an organ donor as his final wish.
He gave a four-year-old girl his heart—
directed it to her, specifically,
so that a mother and father he’d never meet
