IT TOOK SEVERAL drafts to get the letters right. To distill her boy’s life into the two-dimensionality of words on paper. To paint a picture of someone so full of energy and love so that the beneficiaries of his death, the recipients of his organs, would know just how lucky they were.
Three weeks earlier, the thread that held Christine Cheers’s world together had been ripped clean away. On February 21, 2018, someone on the other end of the phone had said the words that bring parents to their knees: “There’s been an accident.”
Her son, 32-year-old Navy flight surgeon James Mazzuchelli, had been injured in a helicopter training mission at Camp Pendleton. If she wanted to see him while he was still alive, she needed to get on the next flight from Jacksonville, Florida, to San Diego—and she needed to pray.
James was still breathing when Christine and his stepfather, David Cheers, arrived at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California, the next morning. Machines were keeping him alive, and the doctors told Christine that what she was seeing was likely his future—that her scuba diving, world-traveling, overachiever of a son was never going to wake up. He would never breathe on his own.
He would never smile at her again.
It was time for Christine to honor the spirit of a man who had switched his major from commerce engineering to premed because he wanted to help people. It was time to make her very worst day some stranger’s best one.
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