People assume, when they hear the rest of it, that I must regret giving him my kidney, and I have thought about this honestly, in the quiet, and I do not.

I want to say that plainly, because it matters to who I am, and I am done letting other people decide who I am.

I gave Gregor my kidney freely.

At the time I gave it, I still believed in the marriage — or I believed in the version of myself that gave things, which by then was most of what I had left of myself.

He was dying by inches on dialysis, gray and frightened, three mornings a week hooked to a machine, and the tests came back that I was a match, and I did not hesitate, because in twenty-two years of hesitating over nothing I had never once hesitated over a chance to be needed.

Was that love or was that the sickness of my own self-erasure?