My son hated hospitals. Needles could make my six-foot-tall, thirty-year-old son turn pale. Doctors made him nervous. Hospitals were even worse. He had good reason.
When Ethan was seventeen, his older brother, Daniel, died in a hospital after a terrible accident. I spent the next thirteen years watching my son carry that loss in ways he rarely talked about.
So when Ethan walked into my kitchen one Sunday afternoon, opened my refrigerator as casually as if he still lived there, and said, “Mom, I’m donating a kidney,” I honestly thought he was joking.