Seriously. My cousin Shira gave me one of her kidneys in 2023. It lives in me now. We’re getting along.
I would have retired from philanthropy after the kidney. Spent the next forty years bringing it up whenever someone asked me for a favor.
Shira apparently considers it a good start.
Now she’s running the 2027 London Marathon for Kidney Donor Athletes. Her second marathon, because the first one evidently failed to establish the point.
There’s a lot of joking you can do about having someone else’s organ. There’s considerably less you can say that adequately thanks them for it.
What she gave me shows up in ordinary days. Work. Dinner with my family. Time with my kids. Things that don’t look particularly remarkable until you think about what made them possible.
It’s an extraordinary thing to do for someone. It’s also a very Shira thing to do.
Kidney Donor Athletes shares donor stories and shows what’s possible after donation. Shira is taking that message to London, with one kidney and what I can only assume is an unreasonable training schedule.
I love her. I’m grateful to her. And I would very much like her to reach her fundraising goal without having to donate anything else.
Eric