My Son’s Driver’s Education Teacher Talks About Organ Donation
Joan Glass
Before she suggests that our children consider becoming donors,
the instructor explains that we are here, taking a mandatory parent class
alongside them because when parents are more involved in their child’s
driving education, the exorbitant teen death rate decreases, slightly.
Today my nephew’s father posts a photo of him on social media
with the caption: if he were still here, what would he be doing now?
If he had lived, he’d likely be learning to drive too.
Last month, I finally read the police report and learned that his organs
were harvested just thirty minutes after his death. When we said goodbye
to him his heart and lungs were already keeping someone else alive.
I tell my son that the instructor reminds me of the lady from Office Space
who famously says in a sing-song voice: it sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.
He chuckles, returns to taking notes, serious about learning to drive,
serious about the freedom that entails, not thinking at all about where
his body’s journey began or how it might end.
Just before his birth, my son and I were more in sync than we’d ever
be again, our organs performing their chemical symmetry,
driving their cellular magic, keeping us both alive with the same blood,
the same oxygen, my hands still on the steering wheel.
I remember thinking that when he took his first breath, covered
in blood, it sounded like the gasp of someone surprised to be alive.
Joan Kwon Glass is the author of “How to Make Pancakes For a Dead Boy” (Harbor Editions, 2022). Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in Diode, Rattle, Kissing Dynamite, trampset, Rust & Moth, & many others. Since 2018, Joan has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She tweets @joanpglass & you may read her previously published work at www.joankwonglass.com.