"Sweetheart, don't go any further down this road."
I tried to sound calm as I spoke to my husband, Jim, against the background of a Red Sox game on our car radio.
It was September 4, during our vacation on the remote end of Cape Cod. Barely 10 minutes earlier, we had finished dinner along the harbor. Then, as an astonishing sunset faded, we drove down a twisting, narrow beach road for a nighttime walk on the sand.
A minute earlier, I had felt congestion in my throat. I recognized the onset of an allergic reaction, as I had a history of such reactions to unidentifiable substances in foods. I carried an EpiPen, but I usually could treat myself with over-the-counter medication. Not this time, as a choking flood of secretions suddenly overwhelmed my airway. I remember thinking, "This is going way too fast," as I used my EpiPen. My symptoms only worsened.
At all costs, I did not want Jim to see my panic. He had suffered a major heart attack in 2011, and soon after was diagnosed with a serious heart condition. He responded well to drug treatments, and his recent checkups had been excellent, but I did not want to stress him.
Jim, however, knew how serious this was. He turned the car and raced back to the main road, even though we had no idea where to find help. I could still speak, and I told Jim to drive to a police station several miles away. Jim instead thought we should try a much closer building that looked like a fire station. We did not know if anyone was there, but we had to act fast: I was laboring to draw each breath.
A medical crew was on duty. Jim reached for me as I went into the ambulance. "You're going to be OK!" he said. A medic told Jim, "Follow us in your car!" as the ambulance headed 40 miles to Cape Cod Hospital.
Jim almost made it. Minutes from the hospital, he turned off the road, unnoticed, as the heart attack hit him. He ended up in the same emergency department where I frantically waited, convinced that he must have been pulled over for speeding. Our vacation that had started so magically ended with my screams of anguish as a nurse told me what had happened.
Friends have since asked me, how then, just minutes later, did I agree to organ donation?
First, the decision brought full circle another family's powerful choice of years earlier. Shortly before Jim and I married, he learned that he had a cornea disease, and in 2002, he had a transplant that restored sight in one eye. (The other eye stabilized.) The donor was a 27-year-old man.
Jim, an editorial writer at the Times Union, talked up organ donation with his colleagues. Now, I had a chance to repay that gift, because Jim was approved as a bone and skin donor.
Secondly, the philosophy behind donation was in keeping with Jim's approach to life. My husband was the least materialistic person I had ever known, a brilliant, complex man of simple tastes and passionate convictions who could have put everything he valued except me into the backpack he carried to work. The idea that Jim could be a donor seemed empowering, and a triumph over the heart condition that killed him.
And finally, I had to leave the hospital that night with something more than the realization that my husband was dead. I needed to feel that this tragedy was not an ending for Jim and me, but a stunning change that would either break me or send me in some unknown but ultimately good direction. As a reporter, I had covered many horrific incidents, including the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and I was always astonished by the strength of the human spirit. I would leave an interview with a victim's family and think, How have these people survived? Now, I faced that question on my own.
Only a few months later, I don't have an answer, and I don't think I ever will. I do know that my decision to let Jim be a donor was the only light I could see in an otherwise terrible and dark time. At Jim's memorial service, I asked my minister to read the passage from Deuteronomy that includes the beloved lines, "I set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life..." Jim always told me to follow my instincts, because he always thought I made the right decision. So I chose what I hoped would be a continuation of life over death, and I believe that Jim would indeed have told me that I once again got it right.
Darryl McGrath is an Albany writer.