Good Grief

He was an organ donor. It wasn't a year prior to d-day that we were sitting alone in the conference room of the lawyers office while they were off finalizing our wills. Some interesting topics had come up during the meeting and it sparked a conversation about funerals and what we wanted done with our bodies. We joked and laughed because he was good at that, making me laugh even when were discussing the most morbid topics. Little did I know, less than a year later I'd be forced to recall that conversation.  "Yes," I said to the nurse who came up to me and asked if he was an organ donor.  I was fortunate enough to have a friend at the hospital who warned me about the call from the donor center. It would be long, and it would get personal, and how do you even have a conversation like that when your world is crumbling around you? Somehow I managed. Unfortunately, there's not a "select all" answer. So while family and friends gathered in the...

We don't live close the hospital, and there was a road block, and a detour, and I still didn't know except for that place deep down that had never been touched was screaming at me something was irrevocably wrong. After parking the car, I walked calmly across the parking lot thinking, I should be running. In the movies they're always running. I wouldn't know for a while. The fact that they took me to the chapel was a clue, one I chose to misinterpret. And then the doctor finally came in and started asking questions about how Scott had been feeling the last few days, sparking an irrational hope. I finally had to come out and ask, "So he's dead?" No one had actually said it, and I needed to hear it. Maybe the questions continued. I don't remember. How he'd been feeling seemed irrelevant at that point. "So he's dead?" I probably asked that a dozen times to a dozen different people. I wish I'd been in a frame of mind to answ...