Share the Good News While the News Is Still Good

On giving and the camaraderie of the living.

Ashley recently got out of the hospital after a 58-day stay for a liver transplant she’d have died without.

She’s alive because someone decided that when they died they wanted their organs to be available for someone else.

The night before being discharged, she dreamt a song and one of the lyrics was share the good news while the news is still good.

Yesterday my daughter cried because I wouldn’t let her use the flyswatter to kill a housefly that was banging around in our kitchen.

By the time I gave in and let her use it, the fly had escaped into another part of the house.

I took the flyswatter back after she wouldn’t stop trying to eat the plastic part that swats the flies.

On a whim I walked to the farthest room from the kitchen and found the fly trying to hide behind a coloring book a windowsill.

I swatted the fly and asked forgiveness the way I’ve started to do whenever I kill something, then started to wonder

if this prayer made me stupidly sentimental, or if this was a prayer that everyone everywhere should pray.

I scraped the fly’s body into the compost and told my daughter it would go on to give life to all the plants in the garden, including eventually other flies.

When my dad died, the only organs of his that were in good enough condition to donate were his eyes.

Me and my siblings agonized over whether to donate them for the entire hour immediately after his death that they told us we had to decide by.

If you had asked us when he was still alive, or not even sick, it would have been a no-brainer. Ironically, it was harder to let them go

now that he was gone. I don’t think his eyes could have ended up giving sight to the living.

I’m sure they went to some medical school or research university, used solely for the purpose of dissection and study,

but I never remember that part unless I sit down and consciously try to remember it, like I am now.

When I remember it casually, such as whenever the subject of organ donation comes up, I only remember the moment of donation

in which it felt like my dad’s eyes were being pulled from his eye sockets to be given to someone else to help them see

and that part of him would see more of the world through that person. Even then it was hard, the urge to hold onto every part of him was so strong.

The main reason I know Ashley is because she is a photographer who shares photos on Instagram. Over the years,

I’ve marveled at her photography of the ordinary made transcendent or indelible

by the composition of the image, the quality of light, the conditions she found herself in

when she pulled out her camera, or the conditions she waited for before taking a photo.

Because she is such a good photographer, whenever she liked a photo I posted, I always felt like a photographer too

obviously not as good as her or any other professional photographer, but at least good enough to keep taking photos.

Here are some of her recent ones, shared in the spirit of sharing good news while the news is still good:

You can find more of Ashley’s casually wonderful photos, often set in the Deep South, on her Instagram.

And you can donate to help defray some of her medical expenses while she recovers from the liver transplant, if you feel so moved.

I like to think that to give is to prove that the gifts that you received were not given in vain.

If you search the terrain of your own happiness, you will probably find that everything that makes your life worthwhile resulted from someone’s gift.

Even though you never quite know if you’re ever giving enough, given what you were given, to give anything

is to know a little more the measure of your soul than you did when you hadn’t yet given.

Before being released, a nurse at Ashley’s hospital told her a story about a father who’d lost his teenage son.

The man who had received his son’s heart was a runner, and he began writing to the family

anonymously at first, through hospital intermediaries, but over time, he and the father established a personal correspondence.

One day the man who’d received the heart invited the father to a race he was running. The father was at the finish line

waiting with a stethoscope, so when the man crossed the finish line, the father got to hear his son’s heart pounding through this other person’s body.