Most people think about life’s big questions occasionally, if at all.
George Cameron thinks about them every night. For Bill Lombardi those questions are a “constant nagging,” a void at the center of his life. Bob Seibold stops short of calling them an obsession, but he, too, finds the central puzzles of religious life facing him every way he turns.
All three were dying and now live because they have the vital organs of other human beings.
Cameron has the kidney of Clay Jones, a high school football player killed by lightning. Lombardi has the heart of a 29-year-old woman killed while jogging. Seibold has the heart of a young father of two.
“There is no plausible explanation for me being alive today other than that it was God’s will and God has some purpose for me still being here,” said Seibold, who received his transplant last October.
The Perot Systems Corp. manager is still searching for what that purpose might be. “Why is it that God decided that Bob needed to stay around this earth a little bit longer?” he asks himself.
Feelings of heightened spirituality are “pretty universal” among transplant recipients, said Lisa Kory, executive director the Transplant Recipients International Organization.
“What I hear over and over is, `It’s such a miracle. I can’t believe it. It’s a chance to continue to live my life.’
“They are so filled with awe and inspiration. They want to help. They want to be a better father, brother, sister, worker. They want to give back to society,” said Kory, whose Washington group includes more than 4,000 transplant candidates and recipients.
All three men said they feel closer to God than they did. “It’s an internal radiance that I feel,” said Lombardi, a 63-year-old business consultant. “It’s also an awareness that . . . something else is going to come about, but you don’t know what it is.”
Cameron, who grew up a Catholic, had stopped going to church. Now he attends mass, goes to confession and receives communion regularly. Seibold talks of feeling “the sometimes gentle hand of God steering me through life.”
Cameron was invited to speak at Clay’s church and did. “It was a real emotional thing,” he said. “I was a blubbering idiot. The moment I started talking the tears started.”
Cameron said a lot of his life was spent in what he calls “careless living.”
“I’ve had lot of different jobs. I gambled, used alcohol, didn’t take care of myself,” said the former Chicago police officer. But knowing that he has the kidney of such a blameless young man has affected him greatly, said Cameron, who met with Clay’s school principal, friends and mother.
Now, Cameron works harder at being patient and loving, he said. Seibold thinks about trying to help kids who don’t have fathers. On the job, he tries to aid his co-workers in dealing with the kind of stress that he believes contributed to his health problems.
All three men feel intense gratitude toward their donors. Cameron visits Clay Jones’ grave. “I just sit there in the quiet,” said the 62-year-old, who received his kidney in 1995.
For the first year after his transplant, Cameron said, he felt Clay’s presence intensely. Lombardi’s experience with his donor was even more direct, he said. The first attempt to transplant a heart into Lombardi’s body on March 11, 1997, failed when the heart went into spasm and was damaged. For seven days, Lombardi said, he lay with his chest open, hooked to machines that breathed for him and pumped his blood while surgeons waited for another heart to become available.
During that time, Lombardi dreamed terrible dreams. But on the night of March 16, his children say, he turned his head toward the corner of the room and lifted his arm as if trying to point. He believes that was the moment when a vision appeared to him that erased all his feelings of horror.
“I saw this really lush green island. . . . A woman’s face appeared and she said, `Don’t worry, everything will be all right.’ “
Two days later, a heart became available and Lombardi received it. A few weeks later his daughter brought him a newspaper article about the woman whose heart was in his body.
Courtney Korfanty-Rogers was jogging on the evening of March 11 when a car hit her. Her body was tossed into the air, and she hit her head as she landed. She never regained consciousness. Early on the morning of March 17, her brain stopped functioning, and the equipment keeping her alive was removed.
A photo accompanied the news accounts. Lombardi says he recognized the face. It was the face of the reassuring women in his vision.
