The After Party

My friend Bridget is twenty years younger than I am but despite our age gap we are close. Our friendship started when we were working together for the same client and although that client has come and gone, our bond has remained. Bridget is a lovely girl - bright, charming, witty and accomplished. Yet despite all these attributes she has been unlucky in love. Or should I say she had been unlucky in love…until she met Peter. Peter is a tall strapping fellow. He is bright, handsome, and in almost obnoxiously good health. He runs, he lifts weights, he eats a healthy diet, and if he drinks at all it is moderately. He always has a water bottle with him and according to Bridget he tries, most nights, to get a solid seven to eight hours of sleep. “He’s the real deal!” Bridget told me, breathless with joy, on the day they celebrated their six months together. “I think I’m in love.”

Then, about a year into their relationship, while walking home from a romantic dinner on a warm and sultry evening, Peter collapsed at Bridget's feet.

A passerby called 911 and the ambulance arrived almost immediately. Peter, at 35 years old and in perfect health, had suffered an inexplicable and traumatic brain aneurysm. At the hospital they hooked him up to a ridiculous assortment of machines, but based on all the scans Peter was completely brain dead. He would, according to the neurologist who had been called in, "most likely" never wake up; his chances of recovery were slim to none.

After several agonizing days and many more tests it was confirmed that Peter would not get better. He was never coming back. Not to his parents. Not to Bridget. Before the life support could be turned off however the hospital would be keeping Peter's body alive for another 24 to 48 hours in order to salvage from his still living body all that could be salvaged. Peter, it turned out, was an organ donor.

I didn’t know any of this. About the organs anyway. I heard through the grapevine that Peter simply dropped dead as he and Bridget walked home after dinner one night. I spoke to Bridget just once in the months following the tragedy. I wrote her a condolence letter and she called me when she received it. “Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked her.

“Please pray for me and his family” she beseeched me. Then she hung up.

Bridget went dark after that. For several months. “She’s grieving deeply,” our mutual friends told me. She had left the city and had gone back to California “for a while” to spend time with her family and recuperate from the shock.

About a year after Peter’s death, I received an invitation. Bridget, along with Peter’s family, was throwing a party, a memorial of sorts. A celebration of Peter and the life he had lived until it was so cruelly cut short.

The event was being held way downtown on the Lower East Side in a building that used to be a gothic church, but now serves as an event space. As I walked in I admired the incredible architecture and gorgeous stained glass windows. The space was vast and cool and smelled like incense and wood polish and age, just like a church should. Although I had expected a somber gathering, this seemed to be anything but. There was a sort of soft house music playing - its thumping beat and vocal overlays giving the entire space a festive vibe. There were twinkling fairy lights and soft glowing candles scattered all over the place. I knew several people there and stopped to chat with them. Then I went in search of Bridget.

I found her by the bar, crying, but also laughing. She was surrounded by friends and family so I decided I would get a drink while I waited for the crowd surrounding her to dissipate a bit.

As I leaned against the high polished bar, which I’m sure at one time served as the church altar, a waifish young girl wandered up to me and stood very close. “Hello,” she said, reaching out her hand. “I’m Jane. Did you know Peter well?”

“I only met him a few times,” I told her, “but Bridget is a friend so I’m here for her.”

“I have his corneas,” Jane said, gazing up at me in the soft light of the bar, her sparkling green eyes framed by thick black lashes. “I would be blind without them.” And then she wandered away.

When I saw a break in the action I went over to Bridget. She looked okay. Sad but okay, and I felt, in that instance, that with time and the support of her family and friends she would make it through. I told her about meeting Jane and her corneas and Bridget smiled and pulled me close. “They’re all here,” she whispered into my ear. "That’s why we had to wait so long to throw this party. To see if the transplants worked. Almost all of them did. And everyone who got a piece of Peter, who wanted to come here to celebrate his gift to them, is here.”

I was speechless. And I suddenly found myself hoping no one there would ask me what box I had checked on my drivers license. Because I had checked, most emphatically, NO to organ donation. “They’re not chopping me up!” my mother had told me, decades ago, when I asked her what box I should check. “And you’re my daughter so they’re not chopping you up either.” The way it was presented to me was so dark and disturbing (I mean who wants to be “chopped up”) that I simply checked NO when I first got my license and never thought about it again.

But not Peter. Peter had checked YES, and this party was almost radiating with joy because of the selfless action he had taken so many years ago when he first learned how to drive.

At the party I met Jane, sporting Peter’s perfectly functioning corneas. I also met the recipient, a burn victim, of the majority of Peter’s skin. I was told, although I did not meet them all, that there were others there who had been saved by Peter’s post-life generosity…a kidney, a lung, and even his liver.

They had used everything that could be used from Peter. Things I didn’t even know could be transplanted. “They” (the transplant people I assume) had found takers for his pancreas, tendons, ligaments, valves, even his gums.

I wandered around in a daze looking at everyone I didn’t know and wondering which ones had a slice of Peter inside of them. Keeping them alive. Keeping them healthy. Keeping them here, with us, to enjoy another day.

I bumped into a friend of mine and although I was flooded with a deep sense of wonder I was also a little freaked out. “This is kind of weird,” I told her. “Super sci-fi.”

She laughed and gave me a hug. “Yes. It is weird. But also so beautiful,” and then she teared up. “I just met the young man who has Peter’s heart. His heart! Can you believe it?” And then she started to cry in earnest. But they were tears of joy.

At that point Bridget got up to say a few words. She pointed out, in the large crowd, people who had some of Peter living on in them. There were fist bumps and loud “woop woops” and cheers whenever any transplant recipient raised their hand. There was a lot of laughter and even more tears. Personally I was caught between the two, my emotions swinging wildly between deep sorrow and immense gratitude. For Peter, who had checked the right box, and for modern medicine.

Peter’s heart was there, at the party, beating away in someone else’s chest. Moving to the music. Pumping away and giving life to another human being. A life that would have ended if not for Peter.

At the end of the evening Peter’s father got up and asked us all, if we had not already done so, to consider checking YES in the organ donation box when renewing our drivers licenses. He told us all that although he deeply missed his son, the idea that he was living on through others gave him enormous peace. “I learned this year that miraculous things can come out of even the worst tragedy.”

When I left the church to walk home I took the long way, around Tompkins Square Park and then up Second Avenue. As I strolled uptown, I thought about Bridget, and Peter’s family and the celebration that they had thrown in Peter’s honor. Although it was the strangest party I have ever been to, it was also one of the best.