Selfless act on a summer day
/The Boston Herald
They drove from New York, New Hampshire and Vermont, and from cities and towns all over Massachusetts. They came after soccer games or before football or on their way to the supermarket.
Some came directly, on a glorious September weekend, when they could have been anywhere else - visiting friends, golfing, shopping, watching the Red Sox. Dozens came, alone and in pairs, young and old, male and female, to the gymnasium at Brockton High School to fill out a form and wait in a line and have their arm pricked and blood drawn, when they didn't have to, when no one forced them.
They came for one reason and one reason only: because they wanted to help. Because they knew Anne Luizzi, or knew about her, saw her picture in the paper, a picture of a beautiful 18-year-old, and read about how she will die unless she has a bone marrow transplant and how, so far, a compatible donor has not been found.
Looking at her, they must have thought about their own children or nieces and how precious life is and how tenuous, too; and so they put aside their weekend plans and drove to Brockton, to try to give Anne Luizzi a chance.
I sat in the parking lot, watching cars pull up and people get out, whole families marching into the building, groups of college kids, and the procession was steady. And then I went inside, too, and the gym was full of volunteers registering names and handing out forms and answering questions and directing and advising and mingling.
Over on one side of the gym there was a line of people who had filled out the forms, waiting to have blood drawn: friends, strangers, college students, a woman whose daughter had died of leukemia; a man whose wife was sick; servicemen from Otis Air Force base who read about Anne in the paper, looked at her picture and knew they had to do something.
And there were Anne's parents talking to the people in line, introducing themselves, and Anne herself, achingly young and alive and beautiful.
And I thought, watching all this, how every day we are bombarded with the news that Americans are selfish, that we don't care about people anymore, that we're so wrapped up in ourselves and our own lives that we don't have time for anyone else.
Every day we are bombarded with the news that Americans are selfish
And I thought: how wrong this conception is. Because by 2:30 Saturday afternoon, just three hours after the screening process had begun, about 500 people had already donated blood for testing. And every one of these people had signed a consent form agreeing to further testing if their marrow matched, agreeing to an operation and a hospital stay, to save the life of a girl most of them didn't even know.
We are not selfish people. For it wasn't just Anne Luizzi's friends and the people of Brockton, a city that is constantly accused of being apathetic, who donated time, energy and money to help a girl who needs help. It wasn't just Brockton businesses that donated food and paper products. Most strikingly, most dramatically, it was hundreds of strangers who were not emotionally involved, who didn't have to drive to Brockton, who could have made up a million excuses not to come, who were, no doubt, legitimately too busy to come, but who came anyway and did something good and selfless and unheralded simply because they wanted to.
Anne Luizzi is a freshman at Boston College School of Nursing. She was healthy until earlier this year, when she was diagnosed with chronic myelocytic leukemia after collapsing at a basketball game. It happens this fast. One minute life is presumed; the next minute, life is a gift.
For Anne to live she needs a bone marrow transplant, but a compatible donor has yet to be found. No match was found in her family or in the two national bone marrow registries. The odds of finding an acceptable donor are about one in 20,000.
They are long odds, for sure. But, then, so were the odds that hundreds would drive for miles on a sunny September weekend to give blood and agree to an operation for a girl they didn't even know.
