I was going to write you a letter about how we’d grown old together; 21 years! We could legally have a drink.
But as I sat down to write this, I realized that I no longer think of you as just a brother.
When we met, I was 35, you 21. A generation apart, but close enough that we could have overlapped social circles, maybe come to recognize each other by name. Shake hands. Hug.
But on this date 21 years ago, you stopped aging. I stagger on: 55 now and still a scientific marvel. My body tumbles now and again, but you haven’t missed a beat. Our antigens must have fit like corner jigsaw pieces; even doctors shake their heads at our endurance.
And as we march onward, I see our roles differently. I see you now as a young recruit drafted unwillingly into the Great Gurney War. I see myself as a jaded sergeant who enlisted because he could see no other future. And when you fell, I affixed your bayonet to my rifle.
So now I wear your kidney and pancreas like dog tags, and keep them not around my neck, but deep within, just around my left rib cage. I plan to lay them as high atop Antigen Hill and my legs will carry.
I don’t know the people who were blessed by your heart, or lungs, or liver. But I do know that no one guards you more fiercely than I. For all the threats that have surrounded us — viruses, infections, maskless and careless idiots — we have held the bunker. For more than two decades!
I know men about my age who have sons about your age. My oldest friend was born a week from me. His youngest son is about to turn 21.
I could be that man.
You could be that boy.
Samuel, my boy.
I’m not going to lie; snipers still abound. COVID looms like a shroud, gray as uncertainty.
The cavalry is on the way, we’re told, but we must patrol this front on our own until support gets here.
So I’ve got a plan. I adopted a dog you’d love, a happy and huge chocolate Labrador named J.D.
You create a distraction by feeding her slowly (she’ll bark her head off at that, but don’t worry; she’s all love and newness).
Tell me where the spirit flees When life has made the choice To bring the body to its knees And let the soul rejoice.
Answer.
Here these are the olden days Here these are the golden days Here these are the days to remember.
For yesterday’s gone And tomorrow’s a song Today is the only glowing ember.
O’ Brother mine! dearest Samuel,
T W E N T Y! Can you fucking believe it? Dude, we may be approaching a record: I looked up double transplants, trying to find the longest living double-organ team, but the records are sketchy. Mayo Clinic is still searching; no word back. I found a case online, in a Dutch medical journal, that said one kidney-pancreas transplant team made it 16 years.
Scrubs.
I still can’t wrap my head around it: We’ve been wed two decades! Guess what movie came out 20 years ago? O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?. So did Memento (one of my favorites), Cast Away, Almost Famous and High Fidelity. The hottest shows in television were The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Frasier. Music sucked (Britney Spears’ Ooops…I Did It Again was all the rage), but we were too busy recuperating to listen to that shit anyway.
Speaking of recuperating, before I begin this unabashedly schmaltzy love letter, an apology.
I’m sorry I nearly annulled this marriage two days in. It’s just my body wasn’t used to being so close to someone, and I guess I tried to wriggle loose; the band with which Dr. Sutherland bonded us briefly schism-ed at the suture. But with some quick counseling, we were back together. And haven’t had a real fight in 20 years. Cite me another couple with such cohesion.
And I can tell you this, without hesitation or qualification: In 20 years, I have never betrayed you. Not once.
That medicinal fidelity wasn’t always the case. Ask Mom. I sucked at taking meds when I was diabetic. I’d miss injections, eat like crap, soar over or crawl beneath my assigned sugar levels. Of course, my failures led to us meeting; sorry, I can’t help but see the past through glasses hued rose since we met. It’s one of the things I love about you.
Now, I take our meds as religiously as pastors take confession. Probably, certainly, more. Ask Mom. I haven’t missed an unhospitalized pill or eye drop in 20 years. That’s 7,300 days of meds, administered 14,600 times, totaling more than 150,000 pills. And that’s a conservative estimate. All that, and not one rejection episode yet.
It may still come. But if you had told me in January 2000 that I’d get 20 years of perfect blood sugars, 20 years of no self-injections, 20 years of not having diabetes nibble off fingers, toes, perhaps feet, I would have not only said ‘Hell yeah!’ I would not have believed the offer.
I know your perspective is vastly different. I am sorry and so torn about that, Sam. The decision your mom Valerie made — despite reservations from your father — remains the bravest act of human love I’ve ever witnessed. To weigh that Decision, have that Talk, all while bracing for the Goodbye. She is as cool under pressure as any nerve-steeled Apollo pilot, and I carry her boy as I would a newborn, swaddled and close to my heart, hoping some of that Flegel bravery will wear off on me. In me.
I told Spencer that we were approaching 20 years. He said he would have guessed it had been longer. I would have guessed it had been shorter. Like, 19 years and six months shorter. Time does flatten a man.
But not you. Over the years, you have grown mythical in my eyes. Once you were a 21-year-old kid from Fargo, 14 years my junior. Now you have risen to deity-level. I now see a truly noble soul, angel pure, who loved dogs, waved “Hi” for family pictures (who else is that sincere in happiness?), and overcame educational hurdles to become an engineer at Red River Valley and Western Railroad. You are Paul Bunyan. And i get to soldier forward arm-in-arm with you? Who should be so blessed to be your wing man!
Here’s what I love about you, O’ Brother mine:
You make me feel strong. Whenever I see stories of what passes for bravery nowadays, particularly in our halls of law, I think of you. And I’ll say to ourself, ‘That’s great. Ever laid on a gurney, split open from the belly button downward, for eight straight hours — on a gamble?” You are my definition of strength, and I draw from you for it constantly.
You make me feel wise. Knowing how precariously you and I cling together has altered my definition of…well, everything. Time. Life. Death. Illness. Health. Deadlines. Pressures. You have taught me when to let go (though I often fail). To be content when I’m a bug in amber. To, in truth, see the time-strangling beauty of those moments. You are my definition of wisdom, and I need your counsel daily.
You make me feel loved. In every step of this journey, I have never felt alone. You probably figured out early that I tend to get introverted; I still have danced publicly only once in my life (not everyone is as brave as you). But fleeting is the moment when I feel isolated. You are my definition of love, and I look to you every time I need a heart or shoulder.
You know what’s creepy? A doctor predicted all this, five years before I was born: that I would meet a soul named Sam; that he would open my eyes to the beauty of life’s fleeting ways; that I would take him profoundly into myself.
The doctor? Theodore Seuss Geisel. Fucking Dr. Seuss!
Surely, you know the story of Green Eggs and Ham. Or at least the refrain: “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.”
But read a’ might closer, and you’d swear there was a serendipitous through-line here about us. The story goes like this: Sam-I-Am pesters his friend, Guy-Am-I (!) to eat a dish of green eggs and ham. Guy refuses, even as Sam persistently follows him, asking to eat them in eight locations (house, box, car, tree, train, dark, rain, boat) and with three animals (mouse, fox, goat). Guy still refuses, saying, “I wouldn’t not like them here (Current location) or there (Previous location)! I would not like them anywhere!” Finally, Guy vainly accepts Sam’s offer and samples the green eggs and ham, happily announcing he would eat them anywhere and with anyone and ends the story, saying, “I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.”
Damn straight, Dr. Ted. Sam, I am.
Those tools in the jewelry business say that a 20-year-anniversary is to be recognized with platinum (a diamond is their recommended gift of 10 years!). I can’t afford their bullshit menu, but I did want to give you the only thing I really own: my word, located just beneath my left rib cage.
It says this: I am with you, to the end. I have your back, and you have mine.
Even that pledge is a pittance, I know, a lowball offer for what you have given me without asking for a thing in return.
So take my arm this time. I have taken yours so often. Rest here for a moment. Rejoice here. Because I have an idea…
You know, a marathon is 26.219 miles. Whaddaya say? We’ve only got 6.219 miles left. Up for more? Why stop now?
Can you believe we met 19 years ago? That’s 6,935 days we’ve known each other. Or 166,440 hours. Or 9,986,400 seconds. But who’s counting?
Well, to be honest, I am. Every one of them.
I never told you what the doctors told me before they introduced us. They said that most organ transplants are a short-term lease. On average, they said, a transplanted organ lasts an average of seven years before a rejection. They told me that average was dragged down by patients who foolishly thought thought they were cured with the surgery, to the point they would stop taking their immunosuppresants.
So be diligent, they said. Take them religiously, they said.
Screw religion. I’m a born again Samuelist. This is the proudest achievement of my life, and I say that without reservation or hesitation: I have prayed at your altar every day since our bittersweet introduction. I have not missed a single day of taking the meds that keep you in my body, in my heart. Show me an evangelist with that track record.
There’s something else a doctor told me, only this year. Did you know that pancreas transplants didn’t become a recognized, routine operation until 2008? Every doctor I meet gives me a double take when I tell him we joined forces in 2000. Only three months ago, an emergency room nurse told me she had never even heard of a pancreas transplant, that she didn’t know the surgery exists.
I wanted to report her to the AMA to get her license revoked. Instead, I did what I thought you would do: I held no malice. Instead I took the bright path, as everything I’ve read about you said you did. Instead, I simply held this notion, gripped this epiphany:
We’re pioneers, brother. You want to be Lewis or Clark?
I’ll be honest: It wasn’t a year without hiccups, Sam. The surgery came freighted with nausea a year after our coupling. I got to know the inside of a toilet bowl more intimately than Mr. Clean.
I tried everything the past year. Juggling a half dozen nausea meds. Avoided eating before any occasion of significance (I even had a term for it, “carving widows” of nausea-free moments). Smoked weed like the burnouts I disdained in high school.
But on my last hospital visit (the one with Nurse Ratched), a doctor told me, for the first time, that blood tests indicated some signs of rejection.
You can’t imagine the chill that went through my body at that word, rejection. No doctor ever uttered it to me (other than as warning at our surgery). Then, as my blood test results began to improve, he said goodbye with a single sentence. “More water, less weed.”
When I got home that day, I took every flake of weed, every pipe, every stoner’s tool of choice, chucked them in bins and stored them under the sink and in the rafters of the garage, never to be touched again. Then I went to the grocery store and bought literally dozens of Gatorade, Powerade, every beverage the docs said would keep you hydrated, keep your potassium and magnesium levels at proper measure.
This is what my fridge looks like now. I guzzle ades like a linebacker in the fourth quarter of a television commercial.
And you know what? The nausea disappeared like a Vegas magic trick. Mom would be pissed if I didn’t knock on wood at that utterance. So I’m rapping my forehead now.
But I feel stronger now, tougher now, smarter now. Who could dare claim credit except you?
A final admission before I wrap up this blathering. Whenever someone asks me whether I’m up to a daunting task, I like to act tough. I say, “Are you kidding? I carry the dead.”
That’s a bald faced lie. In truth, I carry the living.
