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Anything emotionally draining makes me far more tired than if I physically ran five miles.
“How’d it go?” Harlow asks, sitting at the kitchen island doing her homework.
“Good. Everything looked great,” I tell her, as Mom slips the leash on Perry to take him for a walk.
I slide onto the stool beside Harlow.
“I wasn’t sure if you should see this or not,” she begins, biting her lip nervously, “but I figured better to find out now, and it might not be … I mean, he might not be …”
“What?” I blurt confused.
“Oh, just look.”
She slides the local newspaper across the granite countertop to me.
“What am I looking at?” I’m confused as the headline is about nothing important.
“There.” She points to the bottom of the front page.
My eyes follow her finger. There’s a picture of a boy, a boy I recognize. For a moment my heart stops, thinking it’s Spencer—Spencer whom I haven’t spoken to since all this happened since it happened so fast, but it’s not him. It’s another boy, but I know him because I met him, however briefly it was. T.J., Spencer’s friend.
The headline reads LOCAL BOY KILLED BY DRUNK DRIVER
Below it is a picture of T.J. in a baseball uniform and cap.
I read the article below it.
A local Santa Monica teen, Thomas James Werth, was killed when a drunk driver t-boned the car he was driving home from a late visit at his ailing grandmother’s.
His parents, Tessa and John Werth, describe him as a bright, happy young man who had a promising future ahead of him. Thomas, in his senior year of high school, was being scouted by several prestigious colleges to play baseball.
His parents have made the decision to donate his organs in this hopes that while Thomas is gone, others will get to live because of him.
The funeral will be held this Saturday, May the twenty-sixth at Kell’s Funeral Home at three o’ clock.
His family asks that in lieu of flowers you make a donation to Santa Monica County High School in his name instead.
I lower the paper and blink at my sister.
“You think …?” I pause, and she nods.
“It makes sense, right? I mean, they told you it was a seventeen-year-old and he’s eighteen.”
I swallow thickly, my heart racing.
It crossed my mind, of course, to wonder who my donor was, and I knew curiosity would eventually get the best of me and I’d look into it more, but seeing it there, right in front of me, makes it more real than anything else could have, and it hurts.
While I was happy and celebrating getting a kidney, this family was mourning their son. My chest felt tight and my heart hurt for them.
It seemed wrong that I should be happy while they lost their son.
He was a real boy, a guy practically my age since I’d be eighteen in a month, who had a future in front of him. A future that got cut short while mine seemed to be beginning because of him.
He was Spencer’s friend too.
We didn’t know for sure, of course, but I didn’t see how the kidney inside me couldn’t be T.J.’s.
I stare at his picture, his smiling face, and realize his parents are only ever going to remember him like this.
