Jesse Thorp

It came rolled up in a poster tube, sticking up out of the mailbox all white and taped up. The blue ballpoint pen told me it was from a family named Thorp in Selah. Sweetie knew right away who it was from. She’s like that some times, the way she keeps things locked away for future use.

“Where’s it from?” she asked me again when I told her the name on the return address. But she knew already, knew before I even told her.

Inside the tube was a large poster, and a three-page letter with a small picture of a bare-chested young man with his arm around his dog paper-clipped to the top corner.

Jesse Thorp was a sixteen-year-old boy who died when the PT Cruiser he was driving lost control and veered off a highway back in the fall of 2000. He was also the boy who’s liver Ike got when Ike was so sick and no doubt on his way to an early death.

Jesse Thorp was the boy who’s death saved Ike’s life.

We had learned his name a day or two after the surgery. The transplant unit keeps this information confidential, but in this age of online Internet access it was just a simple search of some local online newspapers that didn’t take much more than ten minutes to find. I don’t think we even hesitated…it was just something the both of us wanted to know and so we found it.

Ike’s middle name is Jesse, spelled the same way and all, named after my Great grandfather who lies buried in a cemetery above the town of Missouri Valley, Iowa. When Ike was first diagnosed with his illness we heard of another boy who died named Jesse, who had shared the same illness as Ike and who died in a clinical gene therapy trial gone wrong, looking for a cure. It is a name that for some reason keeps coming back to us, not a common name, but common name around here.

It was a terribly sad letter, and so out of the blue that it really shook us up. The way that it works is that it’s up to the receiving family to make first contact, which we did almost two years ago. I guess we always figured that we would get this letter someday. But it was a very hard read nonetheless.

I don’t know what it is to lose a son. Not one that you have seen grown up, that you have put a life’s work into. I know what it is to live in that place between life and death. I know what it feels like to be powerless when your son is just barely holding on to life. I know what it’s like to have a doctor tell you that your son isn’t going to make it. I know that kind of fear, but I don’t know that kind of loss.

I tell you one thing. It makes all of life’s problems seem very small and insignificant in comparison, when all the things you felt were so important and pressing and meaningful in the blink of an eye become absolutely irrelevant.

You hold your family closer and everything gets kind of quiet, like you’re watching snow fall, or a fire in the fireplace, or the last few rays of light in a Key West sunset.