Today Robert and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary, just under four months after our 18th transplant anniversary. I learned recently that timing—the surgery preceding the wedding—was very purposeful. At least on Robert’s part.
I remember in the weeks prior to surgery, I visited him at the dialysis unit as I often did. One of the dialysis technicians congratulated me on our upcoming surgery…and our engagement.
My brows furrowed a little in confusion because, “I don’t see any rings on these fingers,” I said, waving reverse jazz hands.
Not that Robert and I hadn’t talked about a life together. That came up within a couple of months of dating. We were in our early thirties, after all. But the actual proposal didn’t happen until we were in recovery. Early enough, that it was still painful for him to get down on one knee, but post-surgery nonetheless. And I was not about to shout our engagement from the rooftops until there was at least one ring on my finger.
For Robert, that meant my showing up to surgery first. I had assumed he didn’t want to tie me into a future that he wasn’t sure he could promise. That was just a part of it.
“It would have been awkward,” he said, for us to be engaged to be married, but I reneged on the promise to give him a kidney.
While some may interpret that as some kind of messy quid pro quo, I get it.
I get it, because I wasn’t Robert’s first rodeo, so to speak. I wasn’t the first person who pledged to give him a kidney.
He says he doesn’t remember who the first was (which I’m not sure I believe), but he does remember in Maya Angelou fashion how it made him feel. It made him feel like he could not accept anyone else’s pledge. It was too much of a letdown, which is why his first reaction was , “I can’t do that,” when I suggested I be his donor. Only my persistence gave him some assurance. I didn’t know he wouldn’t be fully assured until he woke up after surgery with a new kidney.
That said, he held no grudges. After all, most offered a reason for why they couldn’t go through with it. A pre-existing condition. A condition they didn’t even know they had. And then there were those who simply got caught up in the moment of wanting to act on their empathy for Robert’s plight as such a young and talented person on dialysis, facing his own mortality. And then the moment passed and reality set in.
“Oh, ok y’all don’t care that much,” I remember a friend’s sassy adult child offering when there was some hesitancy on why we hadn’t donated. At the time, I was still under the delusion that his time would soon come when a deceased donor kidney would come through for him, before I better understood the realities of a system that found kidneys for some in need much more often than it did the melanin-enriched others. And yet that same person was disgusted, like someone who feels faint the sight of blood, when I actually did demonstrate that I cared that much.
And here we are, 18 years later. It hasn’t always been easy. Post-transplant or marriage. It most certainly has not. All I know, giving my kidney and my hand in marriage to Robert are Oprah-this-I-know-for-sure in my top five all-time best life decisions.
Happy Anniversary to Us!