That the donation papers were the end of it.

I was wrong.

There was one more thing waiting for me, and it was already, at that moment, in a doctor’s hands, down the hall.

But I want to say something about the signing itself, before I tell you what came next, because I have learned something from it that I did not know before.

In the moment, signing those papers felt like the hardest thing I had ever done, and it felt, in my grief-maddened state, almost like a second loss — like I was giving him away twice, once to death and once to strangers.

I nearly could not do it.