Before my 19-year-old son passed away, he chose to donate his heart to an 18-year-old girl. After the transplant, her mother came to me and placed a letter from my son in my hands. It began with the words, “Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”
My husband, Thomas, had d:ie:d years before, so I raised our son on my own.
He was everything I had.
Only a year earlier, he had been completely healthy.
Then one afternoon, he suddenly became dizzy and collapsed.
After weeks of medical tests and appointments with specialists, a doctor finally told me that he had a rare, progressive neurological disease.
There was no cure.
I refused to believe that was the end of the road.
I sold my car, sold the family gold I had carefully kept for years, and spent almost every penny I had on specialists, treatments, and anything else that offered even the smallest possibility of saving him.
Nothing helped.
My son continued growing weaker.
I couldn’t understand how I was supposed to lose him too.
I had already buried my husband, Thomas.
Now I was being told that I might have to bury the boy I had raised by myself and somehow go on with no one left.
I had spent years imagining him growing older, falling in love, getting married, and building a family and a life of his own.
Then one evening at the hospital, he reached for my hand.
“Mom, I want to do something that matters. If I can, I want to give my heart to someone who needs it.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“Please, Mom. If I’m really going to heaven, let this be my final wish. I already talked to the doctor, and he told me it can be done.”
I cried, but after a while, I finally nodded.
After my son died, his heart was given to an 18-year-old girl.
At his funeral, a woman I had never seen before came up to me.
“My daughter received your son’s heart,” she told me.
Then she placed a sealed envelope in my hands.
“He asked me to give this to you.”
I knew Lucas’s handwriting the moment I saw it.
The very first line said:
“Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”
