Originally printed in the Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky). Excerpted with permission of the author.
It's 1 a.m. I'm kneeling in the stillness of a small chapel to pray. I do this every week. Parishioners at my Catholic church, St. Luke, pray in shifts in this Eucharistic Adoration Chapel 24 hours a day, seven days a week, breaking only for part of Holy Week.
My shift is 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. every Friday, a time when the world outside my church is silent.
Often, the time is deeply spiritual. But sometimes, in the silence, as I hear my prayers go out, I know that my mind is wandering. At those times, the whole thing feels routine. I begin with a few short prayers.
Then I read the bulletin board filled with "sticky notes" that request specific prayers. Somebody has a relative who has been diagnosed with cancer. Someone else is having marital problems and needs help with rent money.
Then I pray the rosary.
The silence is ideal for reflection. And on this night, last September, I had something to contemplate. This night was anything but routine.
For the first time ever, I added my own sticky note to the prayer board.
"Please pray that the recent blood test I took comes back positive so that I can donate my kidney to my friend Charlie."
Charlie Tremont is 47. He was diagnosed with kidney disease more than half a lifetime ago.
When I offered my prayer, Charlie had been on dialysis for 23 years. Three-and-a-half hours for each session, three times a week. In all, I figure, he had spent 11,200 hours tied to the machine that cleaned his blood.
But his time was running out. Without a new kidney, Charlie's quality of life--already deteriorating--would continue to slip. Death would follow.
Charlie had questions about his future, but doctors found it increasingly difficult to come up with answers because so few people had been on dialysis for so long.
"I decided I could write the final chapter of the book here and that could be the one that they keep referring to," he told me, "or I could get out of this business of dialysis and pursue a treatment with transplantation."
So in 1997, Charlie went on a waiting list for a cadaver kidney.
