Back in February, I called an old friend of mine. We had not spoken in several months. I had been wrapped up with a new job, and we don't live in the same city. When he answered the phone, his first words were, "I have big news!" My heart did when of those crazy roller coaster loops, when you're gearing up to hear someone's "big news": you're hoping it's good but scared it might be bad.
"My wife had a liver transplant!"
That was unexpected.
Turns out, she had had liver disease caused by an autoimmune disorder of unknown origins. Moreover, she had struggled with this disease for 15 years! It wasn't something she had wanted to make public, so, even though I had known this family for most of those years, I had not known she had any health problems. Turns out the diagnosis had many troubling layers, as such things often do. Not only was she faced with a variety of exhausting symptoms, the doctors could offer the following "plan":
We'll wait until you get really, really sick and then hope to find you a donor. The good news is, we can now do live donor transplants (more on that later) provided you can find someone willing to give you part of their healthy liver. The bad news is, you could develop liver cancer in the meantime. If that happens, there is nothing we can do.
So she did what one can do in the face of grim uncertainty: she kept going. She raised children, cared for an ailing parent, fended off exhaustion and pain. And everyday, she wonder about that anvil over her head. Would she beat the clock or would cancer make a photo finish?
When my friend came to town several weeks later, we caught up more. The awesome news was (and is) that his wife was doing astoundingly well. A distant cousin was a "match" and had courageously agreed to participate in the live donor procedure. The doctors took the diseased liver from my friend's wife, and implanted part of the donor's healthy liver. In one of those miracles of the human body, a healthy liver can regenerate, so, if all went according to plan, both donor and recipient would start with half a liver that would grow into two new wholes! Who can get one's mind around it?!
Several months had gone by, and both donor and recipient were doing very well. It was time for my friend's wife to consider her future. Suddenly, overnight, she was disease free. This albatross that had weighed heavily for so very long was gone. This burden that had defined every detail of her life had disappeared. What now? My friend and I talked about it a lot, and as you can see, it is still on my mind. How do you start a new life when the old one seemed so clearly defined?
The motivational speaker Byron Katie asks, "Who would you be without your story?" My friend's wife had a very literal story: she had a bad liver, then she did not. So what about the rest of us? What if we set down our stories? "I have a bad relationship with my step-father;" "My co-workers don't respect me;" "My alcoholic mother ruined my life;" etc. What if those didn't exist for us because we chose to live without them?
It occurs to me that a wide open space would stretch out in front of us, and the thought of that emptiness, just sitting there, waiting for us to define it, could be terrifying. If you're anything like me, the terror would cause a stiffening of the limbs and heart, making action a challenge at best. But what if even that terror is just a character in my story of who I am and what I'm capable of?
Freedom is like that healthy liver, always capable of expanding and growing. We just need to choose to implant it.
And you?
Who would you choose to be?
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