Miles to go before I sleep
Robert Harvey is making peace. Her name is Sylvia. He met her seven years ago. They visited. Nice lady, he recalls. She had kidney disease. She might need a transplant one day, she told him. Sylvia must have been dumbfounded when the slender figure in thick glasses - her brother's ex-wife's husband, no less - offered one of his own. The offer seemed perfectly natural to Robert Harvey. What else do you do when you can save someone's life? How can you say no? Yet most of us rankle at letting someone cross the street if we have the light. We shun the poor, ostracize troubled children, and endeavor to keep unacceptable people from our neighborhoods. We have endless ways of saying no. When Robert Harvey said yes, it set him apart. Only a few thousand people each year donate a kidney, and most are close family members. Robert Harvey met Sylvia once. He didn't hear from her again for seven years. A lot happened in seven years. He stayed busy running a shelter for homeless families in Grass Valley and watching his children become adults. The memory of the promise faded. Then came a phone call at five o'clock in the morning, a year ago in March. Mr. Harvey, your son's been killed in an accident. Robert Harvey is a nondescript man, except for thick glasses that magnify his eyes, making him look both professorial and childishly curious. Average height, lean build, he bends forward slightly, as if the pain of that morning's blow still lingers in his gut. He is not a brave and fearless man, nor is he a quivering and helpless man, entangled in something he does not have the power to stop. He is making peace. After the phone call, Robert Harvey traveled to Connecticut and brought 27-year-old Aaron back to Camptonville in an urn. Twenty-seven-year-old Aaron with his life ahead of him. Twenty-seven-year-old Aaron who was engaged to be married. Twenty-seven-year-old Aaron who fell asleep at the wheel of his car and never woke up. The deepest grief unravels reason, enrages us at God's betrayal and makes us cry unto the gaping heavens, why. Why? And in the ensuing silence, we are the loneliest we can ever be. Robert Harvey took Aaron's ashes to the Yuba River and freed his son's soul to the churning water, yet his own soul remained in chains. He quit his job, and lingered on banks of the Yuba. For months, he languished, consumed by the unanswered cry. Then Sylvia's daughter called. Did he remember? He remembered. He knew he could easily say no, that no one would give it a second thought if he couldn't find it in himself to donate his kidney to a woman he barely knew, less than a year after his son died. Yes, he remembered. He remembered why he said yes in the first place. Because he could. Because for him, it was the right thing to do. She was a human being and she needed him. He could save her life. How many times does one have that opportunity, he reasoned. One in 20 people die waiting for a kidney, he'll tell you, shocked. Indignant. One in 20. Now Robert Harvey is a bit frightened. It's major surgery, after all, and he's giving away part of his body, but in doing so, he's giving life. It may be an hour, a day or 20 years, it doesn't matter. In a small, yet powerful way, it will make up for a life lost, and in this way, Robert Harvey is making peace. Monday, April 27, 1998 |