My son gave a kidney to a five-year-old and died four days later — the morning after I buried him, her mother stood at my door with a folded piece of paper.
Tobin could not do needles.
Not a joke about it. He was thirty years old and he looked at the wall.
His brother died in a hospital in 2011 and after that Tobin did not like the smell of them, the lights in them, or anybody in a lanyard.
So when he came into my kitchen in the April and said “Mum, I’m giving a kidney away,” I genuinely thought I had misheard.
The girl is Clemmie. She was five.
Her mother, Beth Hask, was in Tobin’s year at school. Clemmie’s kidneys were failing and nobody in that family had come back a match.
And he slid a photograph across my table and said: “She should be learning to ride a bike, not counting ceiling tiles.”
I was terrified and I said yes, because what else is there.
The transplant was on the fifth of May and it worked.
Her colour came back within two days. Tobin rang me on the seventh and said she had asked for chips.
And on the ninth of May, day four, he had a pulmonary embolism.
It is rare. It is one of the things they tell you about at the assessment, in a room, with a leaflet, and you sign something. The risk of dying as a living donor is roughly three in ten thousand.
Three in ten thousand and it was my son.
I was there when the alarms went. His hand was cold and he was still trying to make it easier for me.
And he said: “Whatever happens — don’t blame Clemmie. Or Beth.”
He died before it got light. He was thirty.
Everybody said hero, for eight days, at me, constantly.
I would have handed the whole lot of it back to hear him say “Mum” one more time in that stupid drawn-out way he did when he wanted something.
And on the seventeenth of May, the morning after I buried him, somebody knocked.
Beth Hask, and Clemmie, out of hospital nine days, holding a stuffed rabbit.
I made my face do something and said I was sorry but I could not do visitors, because Tobin had died.
And Beth put her hand over her mouth and did not manage it.
And then she said: “I never wanted to be the one to tell you this. But after what he did, I can’t let you go on believing the wrong thing.”
And she took a folded piece of paper out of her inside pocket and looked straight at me.
“He never told you the real reason, did he.”
My eldest was Micah.[]
