A few weeks before he died, Julian began asking to speak to his doctor alone. I never understood why. Whenever I asked what they discussed, he would only squeeze my hand and say, “There’s something I need to arrange. Please trust me.”
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It was unlike him to keep anything from me, especially then. But he was strangely firm about it.
So I let him do it.
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He died in the hospital with my hand wrapped around his, two weeks before my due date, exactly the way he’d quietly feared for months, never once getting the chance to meet our daughter after all.
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Afterward, I signed the final donation papers with tears dripping onto the page.
I remembered that Julian wanted this. I had to honor his final wish, even though doing so caused me unbearable pain.
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As I was leaving the hospital, his doctor hurried after me, his face pale. He was holding something behind his back so I couldn’t see it.
“Wait! Please, wait!”
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Something in his voice made me stop.
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“Julian gave me this three weeks ago,” he said. “He was very specific. You weren’t supposed to see it while he was alive.”
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Dr. Whitfield led me to a small consultation room off the main corridor, the kind of quiet, carpeted space hospitals reserve for exactly this sort of conversation.
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He set a sealed envelope on the table between us, along with a second, smaller card.
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“I need to explain something first,” he said. “Before you open it. Julian asked me, about six weeks ago, whether directed donation was possible — designating a specific recipient for a particular organ, rather than leaving it entirely to the standard matching system.”
