German Ascension

We don’t always recognize the people who’ve put us on another path until we have the chance to reflect on the small changes that have changed everything.

Tumbling along a road, picking up infinitely infinitesimal debris, it’s sometimes shocking to see how much the journey itself has transformed us; how much we have become the path we walk, the connections we hold dear, the things we dare to say, believe and love.

The smallest things have the power to alter our lives forever.

It’s in this spirit that the German (our donor friend) ascends for us, without any drama – a friggin’ level 26 thief, my dudes. Not a hair on Julie’s head has changed (although, to be fair, there is no hair on her head), but the garden has begun to produce different fruit. The German walks among us or, more peculiarly, within us.

The chimera test that informed us how much of Julie’s DNA remains wed to her original blood operating system has come back. The German is 95 percent of this genetic stew. It’s like a child now, wandering around in this new body, making friends (hopefully) with organs and body slamming any remnant deadbeat cancer cells that remain, settling intimately in.

And it was such a quiet week, too. Very slowly, Jules began showing signs of feeling better. Color returned to her face, our walks grew longer (and she graduated from a wheeled walker to hiking poles), and she began poking at the husband, locked in a geek trance over websites and workflows.

“Come on, man! Get off that thing!”

(But the world is so tidy, understandable, and safe when you’re hooked into the machine. You can look at a line of code and pluck a string out as though you were Hendrix lighting a guitar on fire. It is not, for example, an alchemical experiment happening in the body of your one true love, an eye test for the blind, or a waiting game. 

These are excuses, of course, and the husband is just a nerd.)

We read things in blood now. In the blood that connects us to many of you, our dear families, and the blood that joins all of us to an even more common origin. And, of course, Julie’s own blood – which has been such a shithead – which now shows signs of recovery. This week marks the first one since her transplant when she has not needed transfusions.

Our German, showing herself in such subtle signs, has overcome us on this road. We are adorable to her, the way you might be to someone powerful enough to save or destroy you, and we welcome her into our family, now that she’s shown up to this potluck. We make room for her on this road and whatever home exists at the end of it.     

Although this road may beat us down some more before we get there, we know that love will find a home within us.