Evalyn has the gift to give
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
Evalyn had her bone-marrow transplant a month ago. The words take a single breath. One exhale and they're said. Even their meaning fails to hint at all a transplant entails.
The word is ordinary. Transplant evokes an ivy grown too big for its pot, upended and plunked down in a bigger, prettier container; or a sprawling bush dug up from the front yard and moved to the back. Transplants are a part of gardening. A little sun, a lot of water and transplanted things grow sturdier. Even a human transplant is just a person raised in one place who now lives in another.
Transplanting bone marrow has a whole different meaning. It's not simple at all. It's not about geography or something outgrowing the space in which it lives. A bone-marrow transplant is medical science's elaborate last-ditch effort to save a human life. It's also an amazing act of faith.
Evalyn lived with her cancer for years before the cancer decided to kill her. She hiked mountains with it and swam with it chasing her, and outpedaled it, and skied past it and ignored it as she took care of her kids and her husband. Her will, plus a combination of medicines, made the cancer behave.
And then one day it rebelled.
To save a life, sometimes science has to destroy. Drugs have to be lethal and radiation deadly enough to destroy blood cells so a body can be given new marrow, which, if things go the way they should, will begin making new cancer-free blood cells. Evalyn was slowly poisoned before the transplant and in isolation for three weeks after. And she was sick the whole time.
She's home now recuperating but she's still sick because the road back from dying is full of detours. She's still on that road, so she's not complaining. Family and friends are with her. They read to her. They talk and they cook and they run errands. They support and uplift her. And she, surprisingly, supports and uplifts them.
Strange how this works. Evalyn looked death in the eye. All transplant patients do. And when she came back, she was sick and weak and broken, but whole, too, because she was Evalyn, still. This week in the midst of fighting for her own life, she prayed for someone else's. Maybe it was this prayer that made God pause. Maybe it was the pure selflessness of a woman who has every right to be wrapped up in herself - whose problems could be as grave - that made God stop and say, "I need to listen to what this woman is asking." Evalyn prayed for the child of a person she hardly knows, a young woman she has never met. And her prayers - who knows why - were answered. "She was thrilled when I told her," Evalyn's friend said. "She was just so happy. It's amazing, isn't it? Even when you think you have nothing to give, look at what you can give. Look at what she gave."
There will be people tomorrow sitting alone at small kitchen tables or sitting alone at big crowded ones, who will think they have nothing to give. Sick people. Disabled people. Old people. People who can no longer do all the things they once did, all the things they believe defined them. What they don't know is that they give simply by being. They give, like Evalyn, with their presence and their prayers.
