The Moth - The Moth Radio Hour: Live from Tarrytown

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

A special live edition of The Moth from Tarrytown, New York. Hosted by Ophira Eisenberg, with additional hosting by Jay Allison. A man faces his fear or fatherhood; a daughter revisits difficult memories and her childhood home; and a mother witnesses the impact of her son’s life. To see photos from this week’s episode visit: TheMoth.org The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Storytellers: Adam Linn, Morgan Zipf-Meister, and Sarah Gray.

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slash Houston to experience a live show near you. That's the Moth.org forward slash Houston. From PRX, this is the Moth radio hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this show, and this time we're bringing you a live performance

produced in partnership with the Terry Town Music Hall in Terry Town, New York. Let's get right to it. We'll start with a welcome and a little storytelling from the evening's host, comedian and writer Ulfira Eisenberg. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Moth. We have a wonderful show for you tonight. So if you don't know, the Moth is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling.

People are going to come up here from All Walks of Life and they tell a true story from their life that has to do with our theme tonight, which is all things relative, which is stories about family relations. And I will host it. My name is Ophira Eisenberg. I, many people, I think that's a very odd name. It is indeed someone asked me today, even when I was doing a coffee order.

And they're like, Ophira, is that a made is that a name you made up? Yeah, that's how it worked in my family. Yours too, right? You just got to make up your own name. No, that is a name I was given as a small baby. It is just, you've never heard it before probably because it is a very old Hebrew name that didn't catch on. So that's why you haven't heard it. And I was thinking, of course, of this themes about relations. And I, wow, I'm originally actually from Canada. we walk amongst you undetected, and... ...

I feel like a few people were about to clap, and I bet you're not Canadian, you're just interested in Canada right now. ... As an option. And I moved here about 15 years ago, actually just a lone single. I didn't know anyone. And of course, I was also, I hoped to get to know people and fall in love. And at the time, I loved when I lived in Toronto, I used to love watching Sex in the City on HBO.

I loved that show. And I thought it was this totally over thetop, ridiculous version of what, like a fantasy world of what dating was like in New York. And then I moved to New York and realized it was a documentary. And it had such a hard time navigating through what that was about, because, you know, as far as how people get together and become couples in Canada, I'll tell you how it works. You sit at a bar and someone buys you a drink

and then you date them for 10 years. That's how it works there. You like, you wanna break up with them at eight years but you're both too polite to deal with it, so you just let it go. But here it was like, everyone was at a buffet and they were like, I'm going to have scrambled eggs and cupcakes. Like they just felt like they could have it all and quickly and then leave.

And I found it really daunting. But eventually, you know, I did meet someone who I've now been with for 10 years. And right, and that became my family in New York because to right when he moved from another country is very weird and then recently we just had a baby. So now I really like I have I have an anchor baby and it is very weird being here too knowing that my baby is at home alone. But I am a little older to have just had my first child. I understand that. When I was pregnant, I was considered both high risk and an inspiration.

Of course, it's wonderful. I have a boy. He's a boy for now. And he's very sweet, of course. It's just, it's interesting what it's brought out. And me and what it's brought out and the people around us. Now, we live in Brooklyn, and people are quite, yeah, one person likes Brooklyn.

It's fine. That was the most gentle clap. I mean, it's lovely living in Brooklyn. Of course, we're in a small space relative to where I think most of you live, and our neighbors are very close, but you know, all of our neighbors have little children. So there is a kebuts feel about it, and we all kind of pile out into the hallways a lot of early evenings and put all the babies beside each other. And then we kind of turn into babies.

We look at them and kind of coup and there was no real sentences or words. But my neighbor is also competitive. She is a baby the same age. And you know, no one moves here. She also moved here and no one moves here without ambition or or drive and she's very competitive and from day one she has been competing with me about our babies achievements they don't have a lot of achievements but even at three months she was like Bernadette Bernadette is holding up her head. How's Lucas doing?

Like, kids Lucas. I was like, Lucas is holding up his head high. And now she's like, Bertadette is trying to walk. I'm like, Lucas is teaching CrossFit. You know, like, just back off. And of course, with the baby thing, it's amazing. Because we're doing something very controversial called sleep training. That's where you shut the door and you with the baby thing, it's amazing. Because we're doing something very controversial called sleep training.

That's where you shut the door and you let the baby cry himself to sleep. Because I figured he should learn how I do it. Just working out okay. And yeah, it's very fun. And I don't know what I'm doing, and you ask questions to everybody that's ever had a family, and you go, how did you do that? And no one has any answers at all.

They just say, like, feel it out. What are you talking about? Just give me exact numbers and bulleted lists. My favorite thing to do, because parenting has changed so much, is getting together with people, and we talk about the past. We do this. We go back when we were kids, there was no organic food. There was no hand sanitizer.

We didn't have parents that loved us. And then it's always punctuated with this line and look at us. We're fine. Right? And this is my question. Are we fine? Like look around, really? Because I was just invited to someone's 40th birthday to drink wine and color in adult coloring books.

I don't think we're fine. I'm very concerned. Now, by way of introduction on a math show, what we do is we ask our storytellers a question that has to do with the theme of the evening. And tonight we ask them, what's something that your family is absolute about, as in like what do they feel very strongly about? So I think we're going to get things started with our first storyteller, everybody. When I said, what is something your family is absolute about? He said secrets. They are really into keeping secrets. There was a common thing said in his family, which was what happens in these four walls, stays in these four walls. However, he feels he is slightly violating that this evening. Please welcome Adam Lynn.

So my life changed forever on the day I get a phone call from my recent ex-girlfriend, telling me she was pregnant and that I was going to be a father. Now, I didn't want to be a father. I didn't think I could be. The reason being, of course, the relationship I'd had with my own dad, he disappeared when I was an infant, was gone for years without a trace. And the first time I ever met him, I was eight years old. And it was the summer of 1980, you know, is that my grandparents' house in Boston, where I'd grown up.

And this car pulls up in front of the house, and this guy gets out, I've never seen before. And he sees me standing there and he sticks out his hand. He's like, hey son, I'm your dad. Well, what do you say to that? I mean, how you supposed to feel? Well, I was terrified and confused and a little bit excited because, of course, I'd always wanted to know my father. And a little while later, we're in the backyard, and I'm checking him out.

And he's sitting there on the steps, and he's got this long, tough, did piece of grass in his mouth, and he's got red hair, and I face covered in freckles. He looks like a huckleberry thin, and he turns to me and says, so what do you like to do for fun? And my heart sank because I knew the right answer, right? There's only one answer, sports. That's what fathers and sons do, baseball, basketball. But back then I was blind in my left eye and the vision of my right eye was failing. I wasn't allowed to play contact sports.

So I told him the truth. I said, I like nature. I like snakes, frogs, anything I can catch and put in a jar. And he lit up because it turns out that's really what he liked. And he came over and he said, really? Well, you want to go catch some butterflies? And that is exactly what I wanted to do. But I turned him and I said, but I don't have a net. He's like, oh, you don't have a net? That's okay. I'll make you a net. I'm like, you're gonna make me a butterfly net?

He's like, oh yeah, sure. Within a couple minutes, he had an old mop handle and a piece of copper wire and a peppered farm bread bag fashioned into a net. And it wasn't pretty, but I could see that it would work. So as we walked up the hill toward the field where the butterflies were, I thought, is this what it's like having a dad?

Is someone to go catch butterflies with? And when you don't have a net, he makes you a net. It's like having a superhero around the house. I mean it felt really really good But later that night my mom came in from work and Needless to say was a little surprised to find my father there having not seen him for almost eight years and Little while later she pulls me aside and says listen listen, your dad's going to take off. I'm going to drive him out to the highway, and he's going to hitchhike home to Iowa.

And I went outside, and my mom and dad climbed into my mother's old rusty yellow Ford Fairlane, and I waved to my dad, and he waved to me. And I never saw him again. And that hurt. You know, that hurt. And within a couple years, I'd lost the remaining vision in my right eye.

I went totally blind. And I got very angry. And anyone who knew me back then would say, well, he's blind. It's frustrating. It's hard. And to a certain extent, of course, that's true. But I was really wrestling with this much older pain, this whole in my heart,

that my father's leaving had left me with. And it left me with the feeling that I never wanted to be a father. I didn't think I could be. But now here I was. father. I didn't think I could be. But now here I was, 30 years after seeing my dad, and I was going to be a father myself, whether I liked it or not. And I didn't know what to do. So I called a lawyer, and the lawyer says, well, listen son, you don't have a legal problem. You have a family problem. And there's nothing in the world that says you have to be in this child's life.

And I hung up the phone and I thought, okay, this guy might know the law, but he doesn't know me. And maybe I didn't know myself because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that really what I wanted more than anything in the world was to be a father. And I wanted to be a good father. I didn't want to be an absentee dad like mine. But how was I going to do that? Rachel and I had broken up,

we'd been living in Brooklyn, I'd moved to Boston, we weren't talking, we were fighting on email. And I sent her an email, I said, listen, Rachel, this baby deserves both a mother and a father. You know, we've fought with each other, that's our right, but can you meet me halfway?

And luckily for me, she said yes. And pretty soon I'm getting emails like, hey, the baby's the size of a raspberry and doing great. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to be a father. I just need to figure out how to do that really, really quickly. So, you know, what do I do when I don't know how to do something? I go to Google and I type in, how to be a good dad. And, you know, this is a few years ago. I don't know about now, but back then, if you were going to be a mom, there was all kinds of stuff. You know, this is what you should eat to help your breast milk. This is what you shouldn't eat. This is how you cover your summer bump. But it was very little for dads. I've got another email, babies the size of a plum.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, it's like when you hear a baby is six or seven months away, that sounds like an eternity. But we're talking biological time. There's no negotiating with a baby. It's coming. So I'm a big reader. I thought, I'm going to read my way into being a good dad.

And everyone said, OK, yeah, you get to get some memoirs. Pick up Tobias Wolff, this boy's life. So I pick it up, and I start reading it. And I'm like, what a great book. It's a kid. He's like me. He's got no dad. He's making his way in the world.

Then the book ends. He's not a dad. I have not learned anything, alright? So, another email, the baby's a size of an eggplant, and you've got to get down to New York because you never know when the baby's going to show up. And I thought, how am I going to become a father? One last thing I can try, I went over to Lord and Taylor. And I got myself a pair of brown quarter-royes

and some brown rock port shoes, because even though I had no idea how to be a dad, I sure is how new I had a look like one, right? So. And with the new clothes, I went down to Brooklyn and Rachel let me into the old apartment. And, you know, we had way too much to say, to say anything, at all, about the past.

And knowing a baby is coming gets your mind very, very focused on the present. So, over the winter, Rachel had done a tremendous job at gathering all the stuff a baby needs, bass and that, changing table, little two-ounce bottles for breast milk that look like something you'd use with a doll. And it felt really good to touch all this stuff and to feel this gear and to learn how to use it. And by the time I was done, I thought, hey, maybe I'm halfway to being a good dad. This is a lot of stuff.

And then it was time to go see the doctor. Look at that last ultrasound. And I was really scared. I felt like a fraud. I'm thinking this doctor is going to say, like, who the hell are you? You're showing up kind of late in the game here, buddy. So believe me, I wore the dad pants. And I had the shoes on.

And the doctor comes out of the back and he's got the ultrasound. He doesn't even look at me. He just says, hey, baby looks fine. Go home sit tight. And we go home and I sit in Rachel like, can you believe that we're really going to be parents? Can you believe that we're going to bring a living creature

into this apartment, a human being, and take care of it? Us? I don't believe it. And she said, neither do I. I'm scared, too, what you think, because I'm having the baby that I'm feeling on top of this? I'm terrified. And it felt a little bit better to feel like, okay, we're in this together.

And it felt so good, in fact, very unlike me, I got a little ahead of myself. I put together something called a baby bag, which was a duffle bag with some fuzzy pajamas and banana chips and a bottle of water. Things Rachel might need if the delivery went long. And then the world shifted under my feet yet again. It was Friday night. I get a phone call. It was Rachel.

She was on her way home from work. She was at the subway station near our apartment. And then she stepped off the train. She felt the baby shift down in a very big way. The baby was coming right now, and she needed my help. And I jumped up, and I grabbed my coat and my white cane, and I hit the door, and I was down on the street, and I was running.

It was March, and it was windy and cold. There were cars everywhere. New York City, no people, just cars. No one helped me. And I'm running down the very middle of East Seventh Street to get to her as fast as I can. And luckily, the angel that protects crazy, running, blind, soon to be father's in Brooklyn, was working overtime

that night. And I get to the station and Rachel's outside, Brooklyn was working overtime that night. And I get to the station and Rachel's outside, and she's on a bench, and she's okay. She needs to get to the hospital right now, but she's all right. And I get a cab, and the cabbie helps me get her into the back, and the car is warm and safe,

and believe me, that felt very, very good. And then I realize, I forgot the dad pants. And I don't have the dad shoes on. And worst of all, I have forgotten the baby bag with all of the stuff Rachel wanted in it. And as we drove into Manhattan, it occurred to me that maybe I was never going to figure out how to be a good dad. Maybe all I could do was just show up and then keep showing up. Thank you. Adam Lynn. Adam Edmond Lynn is an author and essayist.

This recent work includes the satirical novel, American Sexy. Nowadays Adam says he can be found most afternoons bonding with his daughters, Zoe and Isabel, over steam pork buns and bubble tea in New York's Chinatown, where the girls go to school. He says, six years later, he's finally starting to get the hang of fatherhood, and he's still showing up for play dates, soccer games,

parent teacher conferences, or anywhere his daughters need him to be. To see some photos about him, with his daughters, visit our website at themawth.org. We'll be back in a moment with more stories from this live event recorded in Terrytown, New York. The Mothradio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX. This is the Mawth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show,

and we're bringing you a live hour from Tarry Town, New York. The theme is all things relative about family relations. Here's your host, Ulfira Eisenberg. So our next storyteller, when I asked her, what is something that your family is absolute about? She said that learning starts at a very young age. And she said in her family, it is well known that when you're old enough to reach the bar, you're old enough to mix a CNC and water for grandma So there you go. Please welcome Morgan Ziff my stir

My mom was a really amazing person My mom was a really amazing person. She was the type of person that could take any mundane life event and turn it into a party in about 10 minutes flat. She was really, really into holidays and she could take our normal suburban Pittsburgh house and turn it into all these magical worlds. And not just for holidays that like everybody decorates for, we had a special set of flags that were just for Memorial Day, that were different than the flags that we used on the 4th of July. Christmas was a really big deal. We had a tree in every room

and every tree had a theme. She liked themes. I never had a birthday party that didn't have one. There was the Victorian Tea Party and the Fitness Birthday Party. I'm an only child, what can I say? I think she just really wanted everything to be special. But growing up like this, that also meant that our house had a lot of stuff in it. If we're being honest, she was a pack rat

verging onto a hoarder. She had all the tendencies. If she saw something, she liked, she bought three of them. She had all of these materials for projects that she never even started, let alone finished. She saved everything, like normal stuff that parents saved, like schoolwork, but then like old bits of wrapping paper and ribbons. She never threw away a piece of clothes.

She had two closets and two armwars just full of her clothing. And that was kind of her MO. Like if you walked into our house, you would never know that she had all of this stuff, because it was all tucked away into closets and drawers, nooks, crannies. The attic was so full that we weren't even allowed to go in it and it was all Christmas decorations. So, as much as I loved this celebration,

I could just never wrap my brain around the amount of stuff. Like even as a child, I just didn't understand the point of having things that we only used once a year or that she would just buy and forget about. So now I'm someone who compulsively cleans. When I open my own closet and I see something that I haven't looked at or thought about for a couple months, it like immediately goes to goodwill.

I'm not super sentimental with things. My husband might get me a card and write a little note in it, and I'll put it out and then find a way to quietly get rid of it. So growing up in this house, I just, I never could understand all this stuff. I was just more pragmatic than she ever was. She was also really sick than she ever was. She was also really sick for my entire life. We had a lot of holidays and hospitals

or when she was bedridden, but then I never really slowed her down. She always like dragged herself out of bed and it got the stuff up. And when she passed away, when I was 25, it was sudden, but it wasn't necessarily unexpected. So while my dad and I weren't really prepared for it emotionally, we had had a chance to sort of deal with that mentally.

So that first Christmas, after she passed away, we decided we're going to do the thing, you know. We tracked down the decorations, we thought as many of them as we could, we put them all up, and we had a whole family over over and I cooked my first turkey all by myself and even though she wasn't there and it wasn't quite the same it felt okay. You know this is the new normal. We can figure this out. About a year after that I got the phone call from my dad. I'm going to sell the house. You know, it's too big.

And I took this a lot harder than your average adult does. It was the only house that I had ever lived in my entire life from when I was born until I went away to college. And I just couldn't imagine a world in where I wasn't going back to that house. But despite my hesitations, this is what's happening. So I go home to help him clean out the house, and immediately it is just stuff overwhelm.

I mean, there's 20 years worth of stuff here that nobody has ever really gone through. And I live in Brooklyn in an apartment. What am I going to do with a formal dining room table and like eight chairs that are so heavy I can barely lift them, let alone an entire attic full of Christmas decorations. And it immediately just made me feel like a pretty terrible daughter because I knew the expectation was that I was supposed to keep all of this stuff. That somehow one day I was going to have my own house and I was going to fill it up with

the stuff and our lives were just really different. That was never gonna be my thing. So I'm standing there having this moment in the house, looking at this dining room table and my dad says to me, you gotta go clean out the closet in the bedroom. In my house for my entire life, this specific closet was always called

the closet that eats everything. And it was called this because if you lost something in my house, no matter where this item originated from, it wound up in this closet. Like that room in Harry Potter where all the missing stuff goes. It was like a series of pneumatic tubes, like would connect the garage and the kitchen. And no matter where this item originated originated it wound up in this closet. And it would like lose a shirt and I'd be like, Mom, have you seen my shirt? Oh, well, did you check the closet that eats everything? No, mom, why would it be in

there? And she'd like open the door and pull out the shirt. Is this the one you're looking for? Just happened more times that I could count. But the real reason that I was anxious about going into this closet was because it was also where we kept all of the family photos and the scrapbooking materials. So I made a plan. I was not going to engage with any of the stuff. I was just going to sort the stuff because nostalgia is the enemy of all successful cleaning expeditions. So, family photos, keep one pile, old, unsent greeting cards, throw away, another pile. And that lasted for about five minutes before I'm knee deep in the family photos,

going through every single one of them, and I'm looking at pictures of us around that ugly table, Thanksgiving, and a bunch of six-year-old girls and puffy dresses having a tea party, and photos of Christmas trees that were so beautiful that they could have been in magazines. And all that stuff started to get really real again. And that is when I noticed this box. It's just a normal cardboard box that looked kind of new.

So my first thought was like, oh my God, here's another thing that she bought that she didn't even know that she had. But I picked it up and the contents inside were like shifting a little bit and it was heavy. So I opened it and I looked down and it is a box of greeting cards. Okay, so she got the guy at Hallmark to give her the overstock for some reason, you know, but then I noticed them and none of them have any envelopes.

And I thought that was weird, so I picked up the first card, and it was a first birthday card. It was my first birthday card. It said, two Morgan on it, and when you opened it up, it had slots inside of it where you're supposed to put pennies from the year that the baby is born, and all of the 1983 pennies were still in there. So I keep digging through this box, and there's more first birthday cards

and there's cards from Christmas and Halloween because who gives greeting cards on Halloween and thanksgiving and birthdays and Valentine's Day and cards that I had received just because or because we had a fight and it dawns on me and it's apparent that this entire box is every single greeting card that was ever exchanged between me, my mom, and my dad from the time that I was born up until the fairly recent past. And I just did not understand this box. And it made me really angry and upset because there was obviously something that I was supposed to know about this box, something that she knew. She was saving these things for a reason, but I didn't know what it was.

And now, all of a sudden, here's this box of memories that I am confronted with. This is what I was so worried about losing in the house, but now they're my responsibility. And before I knew it, my whole body just started sort of reacting without me and I panicked, and I started to throw everything away, just ripping things and throwing them,

and I'm weeping, and that's how my dad found me, was like in a pile of greeting cards, and he was surrounded by stuff. So, I tell him about the box, and we start to sort of calmly go through it, and he picks up a card, and he looks at it, and he says, I remember getting this birthday card. I had it on my desk for a while.

And then I threw it away. I specifically remember throwing this card away. So now we have this moment where we're laughing together at this image of my mom like digging through the trash to save credit cards. And it just dawned on us that we're never going to know the answer to this mystery that she's gone. And I'm looking through cards and I see cards that I signed my name to, but that I don't remember buying and cards that have my name on them, but that I don't really remember getting. And without her, without her logic and her magic,

they were just stuff. They were just her stuff. The box, the cards, they weren't my memories to save. They were her memories. And she had just saved so much stuff that none of it was really special anymore, to me, that the most special thing about this box was that she had cared enough to save it in the first place,

and that I got to experience that one more time. So we each took a few things, and ultimately we decided we could let it go, we could get rid of the rest of them, we took them to the recycling bin. And the next day, I went back to New York, and I never set foot in that house again. But I had this new sense of calm about the whole thing.

And in the back seat with me on my drive was a box of Christmas ornaments and a card full of 1983 pennies. Thank you. Woo! Woo! Morgan Zipmeister. Morgan Zipmeister! Morgan Zipmeister is an artist originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has studied mask and dance work in Bali and has found an artistic home in the New York City Indy Theater scene as an actor and a lighting designer. She lives in Brooklyn with her

husband Kent. Coming up in a moment, our final story from this live event at the Tarrytown Music Hall. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show, and next up is our final story from this live event at the Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York. Here's your host, Ophira Eisenberg.

So a lot of people ask us where we find our storytellers, you know, when we find them in a couple different ways, we have something called story. Maybe some of you have been to our Story Slams. Yes. So it's like an open mic of stories. You can put your name in the hat, and 10 people get up, and they tell a five minute story from their life. It's so fun, and you hear these incredible stories.

And then we also have a hotline. So if you are sitting here tonight, and you go, I can't make it to a slam, I would love to, but man, I have a story that I'm bringing to tell. You can actually leave a recorded, quick pitch of what your story is about and many of those people, you know, the muff listens to them all and many of those we get to work with

and hear their wonderful stories. And you can find out all about that by just going to the website, which is themoth.org. We have one more storyteller which brings me actually to our final storytellers answer, which I love about what in your family is absolute. She says that they, her inner husband, are really into bad puns, which who isn't really. And also, let's talk about this. Is there such a thing called a good pun?

I don't think so. Please welcome our final storyteller, Sarah Gray. I was three months pregnant with identical twin boys when my husband Ross and I learned that one of them had a fatal birth defect. Our son Thomas had anencephaly, which means that his skull and brain were not formed properly. And babies with this diagnosis typically die in utero or within minutes, hours, or days of being born. So this diagnosis was devastating and also confusing. I had never heard of this before.

It didn't run in my family. And I wondered, was it something I ate? Was it something I drank? Was it something I did? But then, even if it was, why was one of them healthy? So I was wrestling with a lot of questions that would really never have an answer. And I had to make a piece with that.

And it was almost like having an annoying hum in the background. So six months later, the twins were born and they were both born alive. Thomas lived for six days and Calum was healthy. And Ross and I moved on the best that we could. We had a beautiful, healthy boy to raise. And we decided early on to tell Calum the truth about his brother. And we have a few pictures of Thomas in our home.

And it was a few years later that it seemed that Calum was starting to comprehend what we were telling him. And sometimes he said things that were sad. And sometimes he said things that were kind of funny. We visit Thomas' grave a couple times a year, and I remember one time we said to him, we're going to bring some flowers to put on Thomas's grave.

And Calum picked up one of his little matchbox cars, it says, I want to put this on the grave too, which I thought was really sweet. And then once we were there, Calum said to me, is Thomas scared under there? Of course, I don't really know the answer to that, you know, I can pretend. So I just said to him, no, he's not scared. And then later on, we were sitting on the couch watching cartoons, and Catlam said to me, Mommy, what is it like in heaven? Again, I don't really know.

I'll do my best, so I just said, well, you know, it's a place, some people think it's a place you go when you die. Some people don't believe it's there. And Calum interrupted me. And he said, no, mommy, look it up on your phone. So I was also curious about Thomas's afterlife, but in a totally different way, Ross and I decided to donate Thomas's organs to science.

While his death was inevitable, we thought maybe it could be productive. We learned that because he would be too small at birth to donate for transplant, he would be a good candidate to donate for research. So we were able to donate four things. His liver, his cord blood, his cornea, which is the front of the eye, and his retina, which is the back of the eye. And I was curious as to if these donations really made a difference. So later

on I was on a business trip in Boston. And I remembered that Thomas' Cornia's went to a division of Harvard Medical School called the Scapins Eye Research Institute. And I took some advice from Calum, and I looked it up on my phone. And I saw that it was only a few miles from my hotel. And I thought to myself, I would love to visit this lab and learn more about where this donation went. lab and learn more about where this donation went. Because I gave them a donation, but it wasn't just signing a check

or giving a bag of clothes. You know, I gave them a gift of my child. At the same time, I signed the informed consent forms that state that I know that once I make this donation I'm not going to get any more information about it. And I signed them anyway. I did that fully informed. So if they did not welcome me, I would understand where they were coming from. But I really thought, I think I have the right to visit this place.

Anyway, I thought, you know, if they reject me, am I really emotionally ready for that? And what's that going to do to my grief if they reject me? But I called. And I explained to the receptionist, I said, I donated it by Sun's Eyes to your lab a few years ago. I'm in town for a couple of days. Is there any chance I can stop by for a 10 minute tour? And there was a long pause. And lucky for me, the receptionist

was very compassionate. She didn't laugh or say it was weird, which it is a little weird. She said, I've never had this request before. I don't know who to transfer you to, but don't hang up because I'm going to find somebody for you, but don't hang up. So she connected me to someone in donor relations, which it was not organ donor relations. It was financial donor relations, but she knew how to give a tour. So we set up an appointment and the next day I showed up and she introduced me to one

of the people who requests corneas, Dr. James Ziskey. He's a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. And I stood in his doorway, she explained to I was, and he was eating a whole food salad at his desk. And he stood up and he thanked me for the donation and he shook my hand and he said, do you have any questions for me? And I was so emotional meeting him.

I said, how many Cornia's do you request in a year? And he said, my lab requests about 10 a year We would request more but they're hard to get and infant eyes are like gold to us And my heart was just in my throat and I could barely like choke out the words and I said could you tell me why? And he said well infant eyes

could you tell me why?" And he said, well, infant eyes, first of all, they're unusual because most of us are older when we die and that's when you donate your eyes, but also infant eyes have the potential to regenerate in the lab. And if you don't mind me asking, how long ago did your son die? And I said about two years ago, and he said, we're likely still studying your son's eye cells right now and they're probably in this lab right now. So apps the tour concluded, my tour guide said to me, she said, I'll never forget you and please keep in touch with me. And I felt something and he started to change. And I felt that my son had found his place in the world. And that place was Harvard.

So my son got into Harvard. And I'm now an Ivy League mom. But I also sort of got the bug and I thought, you know, maybe I could visit these three other places too. You know, would they be as nice to me as the Harvard people were? And I sort of surprised myself because I just made some phone calls and it was easier to set up than I thought. But this, so I set up two appointments, both in Durham, North Carolina, and this time

I took my husband and our son. So our next visit was at Duke University at the Center for Human Genetics, where the cord blood went. And we met the director of the center who had also worked on the human genome project. And he explained that the twins blood was extremely valuable to them. He said he's studying a field called epigenetics. So while the twins genes were the same

because they were identical twins, there's a field called epigenetics that explains why genes turn themselves on and off. So even though they're identical, these twins could be different. And this blood helped them to establish a baseline. They also analyzed the blood and produced a poster for a conference, and they gave us a copy. We then drove down the street to Cidonet, which is the place that got Thomas's liver. And we met the president and about eight members of staff,

and we even met the woman who held Thomas's liver in her hands. They also explained to us that Thomas' liver was used in a six-liver study to determine the best temperature to freeze infant liver cells for a life-saving therapy. And they also said that we were the only donor family that had ever visited before. A few years later, I set up the final appointment in Philadelphia and Ross Kalmani went to the University of Pennsylvania. That's where we met the researcher that got Thomas's retinas. And she explained that she was studying retinoblastoma,

which is a deadly cancer of the retina. And she said that she had been waiting six years for a sample like Thomas's. And it was so precious to her that she had been waiting six years for a sample like Thomas's. And it was so precious to her that she had saved some of it. In five years later, she still had some in her freezer and did we want to see it. Yes, we did. She then gave Kalam a pen t-shirt and she offered him an internship. So I had thought when we made this donation in the abstract and in a generic sense that

this is a nice thing to do. But I was really amazed and blown away when I met the researchers and they told me specifically what they were doing with each donation. And I had the feeling of grief that I had started to turn into pride and I felt that Thomas was introducing us to his colleagues and his co-workers. And he was introducing me to people that I never would have met. And he'd been taking me to places that I never would have been, including here tonight.

And the humming that I felt in the back of my mind stopped. Recently, Ross Kalman, I went to Philadelphia to accept an award from the National Disease Research Interchange for Advocacy. And we went on stage and Kalman accepted this award and I took the opportunity to ask him a question and I said, do you know why we're accepting this award? And he said, for helping people. So I know that as he grows older, there will be more questions, tough questions.

And I'm gonna have to teach him that sometimes in life, there are questions that are important but you'll still never get the answer. But it's always worth a try and you never know until you ask. Thank you. Sarah Gray. Sarah Gray is the author of a life everlasting, the extraordinary story of one boy's gift to medical science. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband Ross and their children, Calum and Jocelyn.

To see photos of Sarah's family, including their most recent holiday card, visit our website at themoth.org. That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us next comedian, writer, and the host of NPR's trivia comedy show Ask Me Another. Maggie Sino directed the stories in the show, along with Janelle Pfeiffer. The event was produced in partnership with Harrytown Music Hall. The rest of the most directorial staff includes Catherine Burns,

Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin, Janess, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles, production support from Timothy Looley and Anna Martin. While stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers, Our theme music is from the Drift, other music in this hour, also from the Drift. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me Jay Allison with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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