Richard McCann Excerpt

I have never dreamed about you, not even once. Not in a way in which you've had a face, that is.

I don’t know if you’ve died from a cerebral hemorrhage or a car crash or a dumdum bullet shattering your skull in a drive-by shooting. I don’t know if you listened to Prokofiev or wore dreadlocks or if you ever swam in the ocean, your body buoyed with saltwater.

I don’t know if you were a man or a woman.

I know only one fact about you, which I gleaned by accident, thumbing through a medical file: You were 20 when you died. When your organs were "harvested," as the transplant surgeon says.

I received the liver. The surgery took 14 hours and 33 units of blood.

And as for you? You can’t look back into this world, at least not in my thin system of belief, though if you could you’d find me sitting here at a desk cluttered with old letters and vials of medicine, recalling what a therapist once suggested when I told her there were things I still wanted to say to my brother who’d died of a drug overdose. "Write him a letter," she said, "and mail it by tucking it into the frame of his photo."

Oh sure, I thought. Talk about a dead letter office. But that night when I got home and saw my brother’s photo on my dresser, I yearned for him to have my words, even if I couldn’t bring myself to say them.

Dear donor, sometimes I feel I love you more than anyone in life. After all, you’re life itself to me. Other times I tell myself this: You’re someone who died, that’s all. It’s sad, it’s awful, really, but there’s no need to get all false and sentimental.

Dear dead zero. Dear no one at all. You died. But not for love of me.