‘My Hope For When I am Not Here’: A Plea for Organ Donation

“My body needs to find its way to a medical research center so they may understand the pain”, writes a reader.

(World Organ Donation Day is celebrated on 13 August to spread awareness and provide information about the cause so more Indians come forward and pledge to be a donor. This story is republished )

Here is my will.

When I die, I don’t want, the rotting remains of who I was to come home and seep into the walls. Why should they make it that last memory of me? I did not live to be thus remembered, rotting, and the unbearable stench of it all. I want my will to tell you all of how I want it to happen.

My body needs to find its way to a medical research center so they may understand the pain and work at trying to learn how to heal those broken parts of one’s being.

But tell them, there are some parts that need care.

That heart they have is a solid one. Just take it for its word and probe it not. It just may fall apart. It has been stitched up all over way too many times…oh look! there is a new tear. Believe when I say, it is a solid one. Give it to someone who needs to give and is not giving. Give it to someone who is much too scared to love because they might get hurt or end up with a broken heart. Remove their whole heart and replace it with my stitched up, glued pieces. It will teach her or him even before that love is promised but what comes with it is never guaranteed and pain wins the auction every time.

Give my kidneys to someone who keeps pissing people off. Someone who needs to handle pressures and hang in there for as long as is demanded necessary.

Would someone need my hands? I hope so. These are special. They have held a baby, wiped tears, held someone still so you could peep into the irises of their soul, they have written poems when the soul insisted it could not think but pour it all into strings of words begging to be understood and never really understood.

They have frozen women, frame by frame, and made them see just how beautiful they are. They have played upon the contours of a man’s jaw, that gasped a growl in his throat, with eyes closed had fingers trail through the scars, the crevices in skin, just so, should I be blind one day, I’d know you.

Give my eyes to those who have longed to look into the soul of the one they loved. The entire miracle of having a baby is the only thing that comes ahead of the miracle of looking into the soul of the one you love.

Is there something I left out? Ah! Yes, if the medical fraternity thinks I have nothing to offer to them, let me not come home.

Let the fires burn and glow the way my heart did. Let my cold hands finally be warm. Let the ashes I have become be thrown into the sea. For, even when the peace of the mountains beckoned, my soul, tossed in the wake of ships that left, the crests and the troughs, in the tsunamis that tore at me, destroying, and I never felt more alive than when I was that.

Or.

Better still, let my body return to the deep dark waters of the ocean, unburned, let the warmth of my heart now be frozen in the chill that my hands have felt and endured. Let me be food to those that live in the ocean. I ate them. Let them now eat me.

‘I Want None of the Grieving’

I want a celebration of freedom. I want smiles, laughter, and quiet chuckles while the mystery of who I truly am unravels. My soul wants to chuckle watching those who never really thought I was capable of epic s**t, extreme courage, senseless cowardice and love that belonged to a universe of my own making.

Let the secrets spill out, as I am now no longer around to chide you over it. Let your intelligent selves realize I was more than just my name, more than the abuse or the gossip and ridicule I was subject to. Know the randomness of my choices and recognize that I was a maverick, forever parched for a love that made me secure, forever left longing for a face on the pillow to wake up to in mornings that gently nudged me awake, for the countless dreams I shared, those I fulfilled and those that now float in the petrichor of rain I loved.

No, do not spend time and money on religious rituals that make you feel secure that my soul will rest in peace. I was never meant for that. I was meant to be free, to roam my universe in utter freedom that I have finally achieved. I already am that. I will not haunt you. My memories will do enough of that I bet.

What will you remember? The hundred of things I did right or the few that I did wrong? It will not matter.

The Earth was my heaven and hell. I chose to make it as much of a paradise as I could, not for anybody else but for me. We create our own hell and heaven. I am a pure soul. Who judges whether I am tainted? Nobody sits that high up to judge me right. As for divinity, I fear that not. I was always known and understood. My life, every thought, every secret, every fear, guilt, crime, lie, truth and heartbreak is known. I have nothing thus to fear.

‘I Believe in Unconditional Loving’

So, do none of those religious things for me. My soul is meant to wander free. It will. If you feel you must, feed someone when you miss me. Make someone smile. See the upside of things. Love. Have faith in the power of your own self to be. Hug someone who needs the warmth and assurance of unspoken presence. Sometimes, hug for no reason but to hug. Don’t run every time some you love cries.

The skid marks I have seen in my lifetime are countless. Don’t be a coward. Love timelessly and be there. Those tears mean deep sadness, the soul’s way of saying it’s hurting, the heart’s way of saying it has cared and it wishes that you cared as much.

Whatever you do, do not be bound by time. Be in your ‘now’. My journey in the universe you perceive and where you all lived, is over. I am now the Universe because I am one with it. Be alive while you are breathing. Breathe.

When you are not breathing anymore, when your heart decides to rest, I will await at the threshold of my universe and show you around that it’s not that bad after all.

Until then, breathe.

Live.

(Sandhya Suri is a retired naval officer.)

(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. FIT neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)