Organ Donor

Auntie Phyllis’s had her hip removed and replaced with a new one when I was seven. My parents told me about it like it was no big deal. She would be home that night. Wouldn’t even have to stay over. We wouldn’t have to visit her in the hospital with the elevators and the gigantic aquariums of colorful fish and the pretty nurses that even a seven-year-old could appreciate. In about a month she would be as good as new. There’d be a scar that no one would notice because, after all, how often does someone look at your naked hip? I don’t believe I’ve ever intentionally looked at my own hip, let alone anyone else’s. The scar would fade and eventually it would be a faint silver line as indiscernible as a wrinkle.

No one seemed to know whose hip she was getting. I figured it was donated because my mom made a point to say that she, not Auntie Phyllis, was an organ donor that way “if anything ever happened to her,” her motherly way of saying if she died, her organs would go to other people. Her heart would go here. Her eyes would go there. Her liver, kidneys, lungs, so on and so forth, would all be distributed to different places across the country to whoever needed them most. Then all that would be left of mom to bury would be an empty cocoon. The thought bothered me, but I figured that Auntie Phyllis's new hip was coming from someone who died in Bismark, South Dakota or Topeka, Kansas in a tragic tractor accident. 

But there was a debate as to whether Auntie Phyllis was getting someone else’s hip because a hip is not an organ, my brother pointed out. It isn’t like a used Pontiac, my dad argued, insisting someone doesn't get a used hip. He believed they gave her one made of plastic – not like Tupperware plastic – like DuPont plastic. Whatever that meant. My older brother argued that it was not plastic at all, but the kind of metal they use on spacecrafts. Someone else told me it was synthetic bone.

What does a hip even look like, I wondered. I asked a teacher and she said she didn’t know. She showed me a skeleton, but that didn’t help. Not all hips are the same size I knew because I heard my dad talk about women with big hips being the secret to happiness. So how do they get the right size hip to replace the old one? Do they use X-Ray? Is there a hip sculptor? Do they come in sizes like small, medium and large? Sold in a hip store. An outlet. Then I wondered about the surgery. How hard was it to get the old hip out? All that sinewy matter clinging to the bone, the blood and nerves like pumpkin innards. 

It made me think of Slim Goodbody who wore the unitard that showed what a human body looks like under the skin. I saw him on Captain Kangaroo. Half his organs were exposed, illustrated on his suit. His intestines. His lungs. A leg bone. He seemed like a nice person. He had a perm and he always smiled. For a while, I really didn’t think he had skin. It didn’t seem to bother him. But if he didn’t have skin, I knew he would be bleeding all over the place. I don't think I ever saw his hips. They weren't important enough to illustrate. They weren't internal organs or major bones. He felt no need to teach dumb kids about hip replacement surgery because he had to draw the line somewhere and by the time you'd need that, he'd be a distant memory. 

For some reason, I imagine a hip to look like a ham bone. I imagine when they pulled Auntie Phyllis's hip out it made a suction sound, reluctantly leaving her body. I wonder what they did with it. If they allowed her to take it home in a jar like they did me and my tonsils which were on a shelf in my bedroom for a while before they disappeared.  My dad said it was educational, holding the little mason jar up to the lightbulb and squinting to see what he could see. My mom said it was disgusting and she was the likely culprit who kidnapped them like the Lindbergh baby and threw them out. Dad went to get them one night when they were playing cards with some friends to show them off and they were gone. It started an argument between him and mom that abruptly ended the card game. My mom never admitted that she threw them out, but she justified the actions of whoever did. She said what's inside the body should not be seen. Dad argued on behalf of medical science. Mom on behalf of God. I don't know what she thought about Slim Goodbody. She probably would hate his illustrated guts.

My mom balked at the idea of Auntie Phyllis taking her hip home in a jar, of course. When I asked her, she covered her mouth like she was going to throw up and my dad smiled and looked at me as though he were looking in a mirror. I am not sure he had ever been more proud of me before or since. He said he would call the hospital and see if they could come get it and my mom screamed from the bathroom. It is her hip, I thought. Why wouldn't she take it home? Why would she just throw it out? It is a part of her. A God-given part of her. What if the new one didn't work out and the old one would have to be put back in like dad put the spare on the old Pontiac when he blew a tire in a pothole. Life is full of potholes, after all. And just because something is bad or because it needs replaced, doesn't mean it isn't useful. 

Maybe they would send it somewhere and fix it. Or they would just throw it in a biohazard bag and it would go to some medical dump somewhere with a thousand other hips and amputated limbs and cancerous livers and kaput organs. Maybe rats feed upon them. Maybe some have a preference for hips the way some people have a preference for sirloins or pork chops. Or maybe they are incinerated and there are ashes of Auntie Phyllis's hip swept up and disposed of however they dispose of ashes, or floating a thousand feet up in a breeze and then settling fifty miles away on a tree leaf or a baseball diamond or on the windshield of a car, the driver flicking on the wipers not realizing they were wiping away pieces of someone. Would they care if they did? 

Why couldn't she take it home with her? After all, there are entire cultures of people that believe that they cannot go to Heaven with a missing part. That there is a doorman who must check a person over, or a body scanner like at the gates of airports. They'd spot a plastic hip a mile away. Even a DuPont plastic hip. Or synthetic bone. Or space-age metal. They're not amateurs, after all. So unless you have all your parts, you aren't getting in. Maybe you can carry your old hip in a lunchbox and so long as you have it, you are good. My dad was in Vietnam and he said they used to cut off gook ears because the gooks believed this sort of thing being Buddhists. So did the nips and the chinks from wars past, he said. I couldn't imagine being so hateful to deprive someone who was already dead of their eternal reward. To wear rotting ears around your neck like a necklace. But, I suppose, I'll never understand war. 

Will Auntie Phyllis go to Heaven without her hip, I asked my dad. Yes, son, she's not a goddamn Buddhist. My dad hardly every cussed, but when he did he said "Jesus Christ" and "goddamn." He never said "fuck" or most other four-letter curse words, describing them as filthy words used by degenerates. He was also not an organ donor because maybe he thought those Vietnamese were right.  

I stood in line at the BMV to get my license renewed. I don't know why I thought of Auntie Phyllis' hip all those years ago. Perhaps it was because they asked me if I wanted to be an organ donor. I was an organ donor for the first twenty five years I had a license, never with much thought. My head was filled with the idea of some sick kid needing a new kidney and me in some terrible accident not needing my kidney. I didn't consider skin tissue being an organ. I didn't consider them taking my skin for some burn victim in Alabama and me in some morgue looking like Slim Goodbody. Without the perm. Without the smile. I had to think about it this time getting older. I thought of all those Vietnamese soldiers without ears being turned away from Buddhist Heaven. I wasn't sure what being Christian meant for missing parts, but I was pretty sure Jesus would be okay with me less a liver or eyes. It took me a moment or two to say I wish again to be an organ donor, but I did. 

Then after I smiled for my photograph and paid my fee and was walking out the door, there you were. Walking in. You were a month early getting your license and I was a month late. You were arriving as I was leaving, early as I was late, which I suppose is somewhat synonymous for how our relationship went. You loved me too soon and I loved you too late. I looked at you and smiled and said an awkward hello that went unrequited but for a glare. Perhaps it surprised you or maybe you didn't recognize me, after all, my hair isn't the same. I am tanner and thinner than I was then. But you looked at me like I was a gook with no ears and walked by, ne'er a word spoken or gesture offered. 

What did you do with my heart? Did you wrap it in plastic or put it in a bag? Or is it in a jar on a shelf somewhere, next to your least favorite pictures of distant relatives? Or maybe you threw it away and it is somewhere in a landfill refusing to biodegrade — the heart is full of eternal hope, after all. I never got a new one after you, you ought to know. Never bought one on Amazon or at Target for however much or little they go for. There was no donor in Des Moines or Tuscon for me. I didn't make the list. My chest is as hollow as a canoe and I have endured without one as I have endured without you. Unwhole.

I hope it is not a Buddhist Heaven. I'll have no place unless you see fit to give it back to me. Drop it in my mailbox sometime when I am at work or sleeping, if such can be arranged. Or do you even know you have it? Have you misplaced it? Do you know that I donated it to you and it was never returned to me? I sat in my car for a while waiting for you to finish and come out of the BMV, thinking I could talk to you. One more time. But I couldn't think of anything to say so I drove away. Maybe I'll see you again. The years have been kind and you were as beautiful as ever. I remember your naked hip. And I remember us laughing.