They Live Twice

Meg Freer

No longer attached to anyone, they travel
by taxi from the hospital to the bus station
in a thermos container, where the driver
hands them off with relief but no fanfare
to the attendant who loads them onto the bus,
and the cab driver can relax until the next death,
the next quick removal of precious cargo
from someone who will never again feel
the suffocating heat from placing their palms
over their eyes, never again recognize
the muscle memory in their spinal cord.
The voices in their head can finally rest easy,
while their eyes, having taken a three-hour ride
to the eye bank, prepare to light up a new face.

*Thanks to D. Malone for the inspiration leading to this poem.

The Science

Organ donation can be a contentious issue, due to possible misinterpretations of a donor’s advance directives regarding end-of-life care. As well, there is controversy around definitions and declarations of death generally, such as the use of medications to hasten death, or redefining the moment of death itself. There is a large gap between the demand for transplant organs and the number of available donors, causing some to worry that severely disabled people may be targeted inappropriately as donors. But when the process works in an ethical manner, donated eyes can give the gift of sight again to two people through corneal transplants or repair the surface of eight eyes with scleral transplants. (Sclera is the white of the eye, a strong layer of tissue covering the surface of the eyeball.) According to a cab driver friend, donated eyes really do travel from our regional hospital by taxi and passenger bus to The Eye Bank of Canada in Toronto. If the donor has been kept cool, the tissue may be recovered up to 8-12 hours after death and placed in special solution within 24 hours. Hypothermia is the most common North American storage method. The cornea in solution is sealed and packed in a container of wet ice at 2–8°C for up to 7–14 days before being shipped to a surgeon for transplant.

The Poet

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and studied musicology in Minnesota and New Jersey, where she also worked in scholarly book publishing. She now teaches piano, takes photos and enjoys the outdoors year-round in Ontario. She holds a Graduate Certificate with Distinction in Creative Writing from Toronto’s Humber School of Writers, and her photos, poems and prose have been published in many journals and have won awards. She is co-author of a poetry chapbook, Serve the Sorrowing World with Joy (Woodpecker Lane Press, 2020) and author of another chapbook, A Man of Integrity (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). 

Next poem: This sea… by Finola Scott