Another Soul Gone

This is getting tough. Another soul gone about two years post transplant. Same hospital as me. Same doctor as me. Found out in a chance encounter with the recent widow.

I can't share all the details as that might breach the grief of his wife, but let me say that even though I really didn't know her husband in his life, this one sears. This one leaves scars. This one is a punch in the gut that I didn't see coming.

Last year, we sat across from each other at the 2009 transplant reunion in the gardens in front of the City of Hope. We are in the same group photo. Today I sat across from the wife bereft of her life long companion. We both were having trouble digesting the cold and lumpy reality that I am still here and he's not.

Swine flu was piece of his final downhill spiral pulled faster in the wrong direction by scarred lungs and weaken immunity.

Like my other friend, he was cancer free at the time of his death. Does that help his wife of 41 years cope with an emptied world? Is macabre irony part of the divine plan?

What comfort can I offer? What light can I shine?

I told her that the only way out is through.

.

The only way out is through.

The only way out is through.

Does this Gestalt mantra console? No, but it's true.

To add to the irony, I came home to an email with my first assignment as a member of the Social Media Advocacy and Response Team (SMART) volunteer force for Be The Match. New plans to help with the good work of recruiting more donors for more bone marrow transplants. More transplant, do I want that, I ask myself.

Yes I answer, but only after too long a pause.

I know we need more saints on the registry. I know more lives can be saved by a stranger, including my own a second time around with this blunt and potent tool of life and death.

I know I need time to recoup first.