A Measure of Gratitude

We were two women on either side of thirty throwing punches at one another’s faces in a concrete stairwell abuzz with florescent light. Our instructor showed us how to make a fist (thumbs on the outside), take aim, and put our weight into the shot. I threw punches at her first. She was younger than I was by a handful of years and just as racially ambiguous. Then it was her turn, and I jerked my head to the side to dodge impact, heard the whoosh of fist through air. Fight Club for girls. New York University. Coles Rec Center, 2004. Fourteen years before the surgery.

I now wonder if the self-defense class was even sanctioned at all. We had no set location. One day we’d be in the stairwell and, another day, we’d dip through a miniature doorway into a racquetball court. There, our instructor told us to move in aimless loops. “Move like you’re angry,” she said. Or sad. Or tired. “Watch how your body changes.” We weren’t instructed to move with gratitude, or with grace. What might that have looked like?

I only learned Ashley’s name a few weeks later. Two graduate journalism classes merged to welcome a guest speaker, and when I looked around the crowded seminar table, I saw her small frame directly across from me. Her dark eyes. The smooth olive skin of those cheeks I’d attempted to pummel. She smiled. I smiled back. A secret shared.

Over the school year, we threaded together our shared stories. Both young and healthy and vulnerable in a city where we’d recently arrived from our rural places. We took the self-defense class as a way to walk through the city with more bravada. No men by our sides, our only weapons were our fists, our pens. We compared our half-breed backgrounds. Her Alabama to my New Jersey. Her white mother, a lifelong Pentecostal from the South. My white mother, a lapsed Baptist from the North. Ashley’s father was a Coptic Christian from Egypt, a cardiologist. My father a computer scientist who’d left Hinduism and his homeland of India behind forty-six years earlier. After decades in America, our fathers’ tongues still tripped on the language. When the temperature dropped, her father would lament the cold, especially when taking into account “the windshield factor.” Joining every volunteer group, my father was insistent: “I want to leave a dent everywhere I go.” Neither of us wanted to correct them.

In grad school, we found our own languages. Ashley wrote elegant essays about Sudanese refugees she’d reported on in Egypt. I wrote half a book about the resurrection of peregrine falcons. Barely a word of either was published. In class together, we watched a documentary about an Appalachian church, parishioners moved to speak in languages only a god can understand. “Something like revelation came up on me,” she later wrote. “My people are Holy Ghost people. Their strange Word is my Grandmother tongue. It’s in my blood. Like cancer.”

“Stay with my dad,” Ashley said. It was 2008. I was broke and couch-surfing my way across the country in pursuit of falcons, after borrowing my parents’ car in Atlanta. First stop: Birmingham, Alabama, where the Egyptian cardiologist’s heart was failing, a complication of the immunosuppressants he took to convince his body to keep the kidney that had once belonged to someone else. He rode the stair lift down from his living room to the garage, insisting on driving us out to a strip mall for a decadent sushi dinner. He limped toward the door ahead of me and held it open like a gentleman.

“It was almost like he was flirting with me,” I told Ashley later, laughing. “Yeah,” she said, that sweet southern lilt in her voice, “that sounds about right.”

We walked the city streets with girlfriends more than boy beaus in the years after we graduated, New York City a savage place to date. We sharpened our storytelling as we volunteered as editors for a magazine we wanted to keep alive, editing each other’s long, rambling essays. She was adjunct teaching and invited one of our magazine’s writers—a religious-studies professor in Boston—to come down for a class visit and then an interview at the college radio station. Then…they just kept talking, and soon they were dating. When she shifted from Brooklyn to New Haven, Connecticut, for Divinity School, they were closer on the map, but the relationship lost steam. She gave me a book of his, Religious Literacy, without wanting it back. It sat on my Brooklyn bookshelf as I romanced with wrong men from Russia to Mexico.

At an East Village book launch for an anthology we helped put together, I finally met her ex-sweetheart, Stephen, and thought, Nice job, Ash—he’s cute. But he was in the friend’s-ex category. Girls’-rules-untouchable. Six months later, he asked me to coffee, and to lunch a week after that. I called Ashley to report that I thought it might be a date. “I could see that,” she said. I asked her permission, and I accepted that it didn’t come, and then, a month or so later, accepted when it did. One night, he arrived to the Brooklyn sandstone where I lived carrying a cooler full of bluefish, which he coated with cracker crumbs and fried up for us. He departed into the dark as a light rain fell, then ran back because he’d forgotten his book, J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. We had our first kiss over the creaky sidewalk gate as the book, a gift from Ashley, passed from my hand to his.

By 2012, Ashley’s father was dead. Complications related to kidney failure. She was left with Champ, his terror of a dog, and an unsettled grief. I’d decamped from Brooklyn to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I’d gone to pursue possibilities with Stephen, in his place of sand and saltwater. It was our first winter season together in the house we’d bought when we got bad news from New Haven. Ashley went to the student health center after a flight of stairs stole her breath away. When labs revealed her red blood cell count was half of what it should have been, an ambulance whisked her to the hospital for a blood transfusion. Procedures, tests, and imaging, cameras slipped into her interior, and within a month, they had found a tumor at her esophagus, and more rogue cells in her liver. Stage four cancer. Doctors put a port in near her clavicle where chemo drugs poured in, inducing a coma-like sleep. She awoke days later feeling like she was twenty-two. But she wasn’t twenty-two; she was thirty-three with a death sentence. She wrote searing essays about dying. About shitting her pants on the way to church. About a road trip with girlfriends in search of Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks, free as a teenager, suddenly unburdened by the idea of a future. The tumors kept growing. Grace arrived for Ashley in the form of experimental immunotherapy. Her body responded so aggressively that she was kicked off the trial. Somehow, it worked. The shadows on her scans froze.

She found a job with a nonprofit that resettles refugees, stitching new lives into the fabric of New Haven. She ran 5Ks. She celebrated birthdays. On the day Stephen and I were married in 2014, on a sandbar soon to be submerged by the incoming tide, she stood in a bright striped dress and read a blessing she’d written for us. Each time I passed through Connecticut, we met at Modern Apizza on State Street, and in the parking lot one time, as Stephen was unlocking the car, she whispered to me that she’d met someone.

“His name is Josh. A radio producer. A rock climber.” It had been a long while since she’d mentioned anyone. Her grin was infectious.

One day in the lull between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2017, Stephen and I were in the kitchen, making breakfast.

“Did you see Ashley’s Facebook post?” he asked me. “Her boyfriend needs a kidney. He’s been on dialysis for a couple years. Childhood diabetes.”

I hadn’t known. Stephen was on Facebook more than me, and Ashley and I were more likely to exchange long letters about trees than the latest on our love lives.

“I’ve always been intrigued about giving a kidney,” Stephen said, pouring his coffee. I’d long been on a bone marrow donor list, after losing a friend to leukemia when we were both in our twenties. But I had never considered a kidney.

We sat at the kitchen table, talking about the utilitarian ethics of the philosopher Peter Singer. Humans don’t need two kidneys. Your second one is worth infinitely more to a sick person who needs it than it is to you, so give it to them. Singer said it was as simple as that. Was it? We had no idea what was involved. The science journalist part of me was curious, and another part, one that likes to get shit done and can also be a bit impulsive, was already looking up the number. I picked up the phone and left a message at the Yale New Haven Transplantation Center.

Gratitude is a hard emotion to hold on to. So is ethical ecstasy. Days slip by, then years, and you go on living. Even the scars that mark how you earned it fade.

More than one hundred thousand people are on the waitlist for a kidney in the United States. Twenty-two of them die each day because they don’t get one in time. Most transplanted kidneys are pulled out of cooling cadavers, although getting a living kidney is vastly superior. But with only about seven thousand living donors a year, demand far outstrips need. Josh had been on the waitlist for two years, halfway through the average wait time if you’re white—add months, years, if you’re Black or Hispanic. The longer the wait, the lower the chances of a successful transplant. His diabetes would never go away, but a new kidney would untether him from dialysis and grant him time, fifteen to twenty years on average.

By February 2018, we’d had conversations with the Yale New Haven Center. Stephen had been ruled out—family history of blood clots. I was still in the running. I began to scour PubMed for studies on kidney transplants. I did the math, pulling up actuarial figures and tables listing the leading causes of death in America today. I learned the lifetime odds that I’d die from a car crash were one in 103. Assault by firearm? One in 285. There are myriad ways to have a meaningless death. There is no evidence that giving up one of a pair of healthy kidneys has any adverse health effects on a donor who is eligible to give.

And so came the rituals of eligibility: giving enough blood to fill half a dozen vials; filling a two-gallon jug with urine. I was told my renal function was so good it was off the charts, and that Josh and I shared the same blood type and enough antibodies. “We couldn’t find a better match,” the nurse told me over the phone. I was standing on the back deck, the chill of winter lingering, watching the oak leaves that had managed to hang on through the season stir with the breeze. Did I shiver as I considered my good health, my lucky genes? What next, now that the excuses to back out weren’t coming?

In April I traveled across the country again—in my own car this time, but still couch-surfing, reporting on conservatives’ perceptions of climate change. Between the stories of floods and droughts, I conferred with family and friends. Stephen was with me when we stopped to see my parents, then living in Atlanta.

“Always keep a spare,” my father said, hesitant, twirling spaghetti on his fork as we sat around the dinner table they’d had since I was a kid.

“Is that why you had Meera?” Stephen asked, half joking about my father’s second child.

“Yes,” Dad said, immediately. The pedigree of an engineer, the heart of a poet. He’s also a worrier, and he was worried his forty-eight-year-old little girl might bleed out on an operating table. Mom doesn’t worry about anything. She sat to his right, by his good ear, quiet unless prodded. I prodded. “If that’s what you want to do,” she said. “It seems like you did your homework.”

Two dear friends in Oregon were tempered in their enthusiasm, a bit clouded, perhaps, like Dad, by the bias of love. That was the body he was born into, one figured, and this was the body I was born into. Them’s the breaks. Another, married to someone who closely manages his diabetes, was skeptical of the recipient. Why did he let his diabetes develop to the point of needing dialysis? I didn’t have an answer to give her.

When I had an occasional cell signal between meeting fly fishermen in Montana and cattle ranchers in North Dakota, I called past donors. I learned that some had given because their husbands were dying. Others, because they’d heard a TED talk. “You think you give something?” one told me. “You get it all back. I wish I had nine more kidneys so I could give them all away.”

A friend in the North Woods latched onto the possibility of reaching beyond oneself, which he took in at a moment when his marriage seemed to be unraveling. There in the place of fracturing—bodies, unions, families, democracies—is where we encounter the urgent need for goodness, and it is asking something of us.

In May, back in my own bed, I dreamt of death and the end of the world. There was no fear. I wanted my last words before dying to include fire and love.

In June, I broke earth, divided Shasta daisies and bearded irises and bleeding hearts. One day Stephen and I drove three hours to New Haven for a whirlwind day at the center: nurses, CT scans, surgeons, and finally a social worker named Michael, a serene bear of a man who made me feel like there was no one else in the world he would rather have been talking to. In a soft voice, he asked me questions, sussing out my mental health just as the lab work had gauged my kidney function.

“So, Meera, tell me why you’re thinking of doing this for Josh.”

I paused. Living donors have a lot of different motivations. Most give to a family member, as one man did for his identical twin in the first such transplant—in 1954 in Boston. For a long time, only a relative or close friend was even allowed to donate. Even then, doctors and ethicists stumbled over the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, as scalpels were taken to healthy bodies, thriving organs extracted. Now, “altruistic donors” (those who give without knowing where their kidney will go) are becoming more common. I was in some vague place in the middle. I knew Josh, but not much. Not really.

Michael waited for my answer. I considered my deepening cynicism, my daily grief. We had a madman scheming in the White House. People were scaling up their assaults—on fellow humans, other species, entire ecosystems, the planet. The world I loved was aflame and the fire spreading. I looked at Michael. “I want to see more good in the world,” I heard myself telling him, “so why not do something…good?” It suddenly seemed achingly simple.

As Stephen and I stepped out into the remains of the day, I was all but certain I would do it. We made our way to Modern Apizza in a celebratory mood and ordered our usual mushroom pie. Ashley slid in beside me on the umber Naugahyde booth seat, Stephen across from us. Josh was busy with work. I filled her in on the day as we scooped up slices of thin pizza, hot crusts perfectly burnt, and then I asked her, “How did Josh end up needing dialysis, anyway?”

“Yeah, that’s kinda a place of tension between us,” she began. “I wish he’d be more proactive about his health.” My friend who still held those tumors within her own vulnerable body sat there and told me nothing but the truth about the man she loved. She spoke of his childhood diabetes, a hippie mom who preferred herbs over insulin, the decade in his twenties when he neglected his blood sugar as it went wild, and the shift in his thirties to doing what he could to make up for misspent time.

Stephen told me later that he could see my face drop as Ashley answered. I pushed the remains of pizza crusts around my plate. The certainty I’d had was slowly evaporating. I wanted to give a kidney. I’d begun to notice the asks: the flyer in a coffee shop from a father of three in search of a donor, the social media post from a daughter trying to find one for her mother. Did I want to give mine to Josh?

Josh’s voice was soft on the other end of the line. This was our first conversation alone, just the two of us. I paced the living room, restless, as he told me his story. By his late twenties, he said, he was tired of being so tired. So he turned to Western medicine. Had six surgeries; got a cutting-edge insulin pump; flew to Germany for an experimental stem-cell transplant. It helped stabilize him, but the damage had been done. At thirty-seven, his kidneys failed, and nightly dialysis began. His name was added to that desperately long list.

His parents were ineligible, and he had no siblings to turn to. He’d reached out to others, he told me—a painful, embarrassing ask. Some ghosted him. After a while, he stopped asking. It was Ashley who had posted on Facebook, and we, near strangers, who had responded.

“I’m a good patient now,” he told me as I looped through the room, and I believed him, enough.

“But really, it’s Ashley,” he said. He saw how she suffered when her father had died from complications related to his kidney. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but what I heard was that he wasn’t exactly afraid to die, but that he really didn’t want to die on Ashley. She’d suffered enough.

What a strange and awful position to be in. I had been transformed into a reluctant god of sorts, holding someone else’s life in my hands, literally in my guts. Josh needed a kidney. I had a spare. But I was hesitating. Would he value it, take care of it? Did he deserve it? Should I give him this tiny, living, pissing piece of me? 

Thomas Hobbes gave to the beggar to ease his own discomfort at poverty. Immanuel Kant considered a generous act worthy only if done out of duty. Peter Singer is steeped in utilitarianism. But feminist philosopher Virginia Held argues against acting out of duty or utility. “The ethics of care,” she wrote, spring from “our embeddedness in familial and social and historical contexts.” Consider the web we create through our relations that reach wider than any one individual’s virtuousness, their worthiness, their concepts of utility. Expand the notion to society, to global problems, welcoming in notions of mutual consideration and solidarity. That resonated.

As did my father’s oft-cited reference to the Bhagavad Gita: “You are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.” I bristle against much of that Hindu story of the warring kinsmen, but the idea of acting without attachment to outcome, that part I finally embraced. Here was a test. If I did this thing, there was no guarantee of a good outcome. There could be complications on the surgical table. My/his/our kidney could fail as soon as it was placed in his body. He and Ashley could break up, leaving Ashley heartbroken, and taking the kidney with him. To what extent was I giving it to him or to her?

As we hung up, I realized that somewhere between the death dreams and the Shasta daisies, I had decided I would do this. Talking with Josh had solidified it, banished the last doubts. I poured a glass of red wine, reached for a blanket to fend off the evening chill, and went out on the deck with my notebook. I watched the gloaming sky release its last blooms of blue, looked at the oak leaves now green with the new season and wrote: HOLY SHIT. I THINK I’M GOING TO DO THIS. And everything seemed wondrous and fleeting and terrifying and right.

Mid-June of 2018 and the peonies were in bloom. My mother’s favorite flower. I snipped a few, stealing them away from the bees, and slipped them into a vase as I chatted with a friend on the phone. I checked my email. The Advisory Panel had approved of the donation. It was the last hurdle. I took a breath. Called Josh.

“Hey, it’s Meera.”

“Hey,” he said, and we chatted for a moment.

“Listen, would July 17th work?” I said, interrupting myself. “With the two-month recovery time, that will let me get back to reporting by Septem—”

“Wait, wait, wait, can we back up a sec?” he said. “I mean, do you still have questions? Have you—have you decided?”

Yes, I told him. I was ready to do this.

And then he broke. Tried to speak but his words kept evaporating. He couldn’t finish a single sentence.

I broke too. Stopped my endless pacing and melted into the couch where Stephen was sitting, tilting the phone to him so he could hear too. I thought of my long search for love that led me, with Ashley’s help, to the man beside me; I thought of my struggles to survive as a writer, to make a living chasing stories. Both were aspects of a life, but not life itself. I remembered what it was to want something so badly, and just not knowing how to get it. Feeling like you can only do so much. Giving up. Letting go. Waiting for grace but not allowing myself to expect it. Because it might not come for a long time. It might not come at all.

After a candlelight dinner with good friends, Stephen and I headed to a summer concert our musician friend Mark Erelli puts on in his father-in-law’s backyard each summer. It was a week before the surgery. I could feel the universe expanding, pulling me with it.

“What I aspire to is ethical ecstasy,” investor Zell Kravinsky once told the New Yorker. He was a man who had taken Peter Singer to an extreme. First he gave away his $45 million fortune to charity. Then he snuck off while his wife and kids were sleeping to donate a kidney to a stranger. “Ex stasis,” he said, “standing out of myself, where I’d lose my punishing ego. It’s tremendously burdensome to me.”

My punishing ego was swallowed up as Mark’s voice washed over me, singing “a fool would ask more…” The bassist thrummed on his upright as frogs chorused from the pond mud beyond the yard. I stood outside of myself under the gleam of stars, fireflies their earthbound echo in the woods. Ethical ecstasy moved my bare feet in the cold damp grass, even to the slow songs. As though in anticipation of the stillness that would soon come—the week I would need help to rise from the recliner where I slept, the month when I would become Molasses Meera—I couldn’t stop moving. I pulled Stephen to me, and we danced together in the dark. A fool would ask for more. It was the greatest high I’ve ever felt.

Naked but for a paper smock. Hair tucked under the balloon of a shower cap. A goodbye kiss to Stephen. Wheeled to an icebox operating room, knowing Josh is next door. Surrounded by masked strangers. Icy drugs plunged into my IV and I…am…gone.

Stephen and Ashley wandered the hospital halls during the hours of our surgeries until Ashley excused herself. She needed go to another wing of the hospital, for an appointment with her oncologist.

“It was peeing as we put it in,” the surgeon, delighted, reported when she checked in on me the next day. “It flushed pink as soon as we connected it. Amazing!” 

Josh limped into my hospital room from his, two doors down, trailing his IV, Ashley by his side. “I didn’t mean to pee on you,” I said, smiling, groggy from painkillers. “Is it in you? Did I pee in you or on you?”

“That’s alright,” he said with a weak smile as he sat down gently, cradling a belly scored with a long incision. “I can feel it working,” he said. “I’d forgotten what it was like to pee so much.”

I shifted in my chair, trying to get comfortable, and Stephen handed me a pillow to nestle on my lap. Surgical tape patched four laparoscopic incisions that formed a constellation across the left side of my belly, along with a five-inch slash across my lower abdomen, like a shooting star. This is where surgeons had inserted an origami-like instrument that opened up like a butterfly net to snare the kidney and slip it out.

Josh was having trouble reckoning with what had just happened.

“I would think in terms of grace,” Ashley began, coming from the vantage of a person of faith, “whereas the more scientific mind is going to think about ethics and altruism. A gift freely given is a grace thing. And the other side of that is the burden of gratitude. How do you adequately express it? Sometimes gratitude hurts because it’s…” she reached for the right way to catch her thoughts.

I interrupted her, shifted my attention to Josh. “Hey, by the way, you owe me nothing,” I said, “except to take care of yourself.”

“That’s what the social workers say,” Josh said. “Just take care of the kidney. Yes, but that’s just another thing for me—”

“There’s no but,” I said, insistent.

Josh made an exasperated sound. I hear it on the recording from that day. One of a few we made. A radio producer and a journalist: We couldn’t help but document.

“There is this inescapable feeling of wanting to do something,” Josh said. “There’s nothing I can do that I know of that can make me feel like I’ve adequately expressed it. It’s this weight on me.”

“You don’t owe me anything, at all,” I said again, stubborn.

Stephen brought up the book The Gift, by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, who explored the societal role of gift giving, how it solidifies social bonds. But live in a capitalistic system and there is no gift. Everything has a price.

“This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land,” wrote botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer. “I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are.” She argues that reciprocity is the root of the gift economy but what, I think, if you even let go of that?

“There are things that are not barterable,” I said. That was a good thing. To be forced outside of the constraints of capitalism, to exist with our fellow humans in an unvarnished way. Stop weighing worth. Cease the endless exhausting calculation.

“This situation was built to confound me,” Josh said, his shoulders heavy, as I insisted that he owed me nothing. We talked for over an hour. Stephen helped me walk for a few minutes up the corridor. One nurse came in and took our lunch orders. Another nurse came in and checked Josh’s blood sugar, gave him a drug that he would be on for the rest of his life, like Ashley’s father, so that his body would not reject the new part of him that wasn’t really him.

But the conversation kept coming back to the burden of gratitude, the gift Josh was unable to reckon with. He compared his gratitude to a downpour no umbrella can protect him from.

“How can we resolve this?” I asked, returning to my pragmatic, bossy mode, even in my stupefied state. “How about this? Can you send me a lollipop every year on your birthday? With a postcard, maybe? Tell me what the kidney’s been up to.”

“Oddly enough,” Josh said, “something like that might help.”

Ash is neither confounded nor burdened by gratitude. It makes her giddy. It’s gratitude, not some moral duty, that moves her to slip Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards into the folds of blankets that drape sleeping figures on the sidewalk. To transform blank notebook pages into a dense repository for observations and ideas and poetry…and not care if anyone ever sees them. To use her double master’s degrees to help the unsettled find new roots.

“I feel wonderful when I’m gushing with gratitude,” she said that day in the hospital. “One of the best feelings I have.” She has reason to gush. While we were in surgery the day before, her oncologist had told her that her scans looked great, that the time had come to remove the chemo port from near her clavicle. She didn’t understand, and he laughed and told her it would be a good idea to start saving for retirement.

“That’s huge, Ash!” I said, and she smiled that same shy smile I’d known for fourteen years.

Our lunches arrived and Josh and his IV moved slowly back to his room to eat. Ashley lingered for a few minutes.

“What if we just toss the umbrella?” I said. “Dance in the rain?” I was thinking of how it was easy to say that there was little to be grateful for—Ashley’s cancer diagnosis at thirty-three; Josh’s failed kidneys at thirty-seven; the goddamn news every morning; a world burning. I thought of Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” the invitation he makes:

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.…

And do what Ashley would do: Toss the umbrella. Get giddy with gratitude.

I had been transformed into a reluctant god of sorts, holding someone else’s life in my hands, literally in my guts. But I was hesitating. Would he value it, take care of it? 

Almost a year after the surgery, the cherry blossoms fought to unfold in a cold spring. Ashley was the guest in Stephen’s class on Death & Immortality at Boston University, and Josh and I slipped in among the students to watch.

Ashley’s figure appeared diminutive beside Stephen’s onstage, but her presence was immense. The students were enraptured as she spoke of life forces and stories, of the “enchanting” narrative of the girl who burns bright and dies young, and the more wearisome one about the woman who grows old. She spoke of the cancer redemption narratives she rejects—cancer as battleground—that imply that those who die are somehow weaker or lesser.

In the hallway afterward, Josh told me with excitement about the latest radio show he had just produced. A little later, he told me about the devices he’d gotten that helped him manage the diabetes. He hoisted the hem of his shirt, to show where a small square poked into his abdomen, continually monitoring his glucose level. A small remote control in his pocket would beep when the glucose got too high. He could then press another remote in his other pocket that initiated a dose of insulin to balance the numbers.

“It’s been so long,” he said, “but I think I feel normal.”

For our first Transplantanniversary, which Josh wrote as one long word, he sent me a card plus chocolate lollipops he’d formed with a mold he found in the shape of a pair of kidneys. On our second Transplantanniversary, no lollipop arrived. I did get a note, a few months late. On the third one, a pandemic had silenced the world, and no lollipops or cards were dispatched from New Haven. I told myself it didn’t matter. That might have been true.

Gratitude is a hard emotion to hold on to. So is ethical ecstasy. Days slip by, then years, and you go on living. Even the scars that mark how you earned it fade.

That, I realize, is what we wanted all along.

The words kept coming from Ashley. Six years on, they keep coming. The last time I saw her, she handed me a thick bundle of letters she’d written, half-finished, unsent. There was an essay in progress where she used the word “embering,” and I could feel the glow of the thing that still burns although the outside has turned to ash.

What confounded him, drowning in gratitude, made her gush with giddiness.

Walk as though grateful. Walk as though full of grace.

I gave Josh the living pissing part of me that would buy him some years. But the gift of it? The gift was for her.