What Karly Did

What I have learned from my organ recipient

I am, I tell myself, a constitutionally pessimistic person. Somtimes I wonder if it is due to being born under-cooked, some two-and-a-half months early; or else maybe spending months listening to Thomas Ligotti every night as I fell asleep was a bad idea. I’m like a Catholic with all the guilt but none of the belief in grace and eternal redemption.

Since Karly, the teenage student I donated one of my kidneys to, died a few weeks back I’ve been rather quiet on here. In the face of the fundamental unfairness of the world I’ve shrunk back in confused bitterness. Teaching students sitting their GCSE English resits who are often jaded to the point that they don’t even bother to keep up the pretense that they’re putting any effort into their studying, I’ve often thought of Karly who sat revising dutifully day after day in the study hub despite being so clearly exhausted and in pain. She did her best. I did my best. She died anyway.

The world owes us nothing and as much as we humans desperately cling to the idea of deservingness, there’s no great cosmic calculator that can weight up how much each of us deserves or does not deserve. And yet Karly didn’t get to see adulthood (she’d only just turned seventeen), didn’t get to live a life outside of hospital visits and pain. Her parents now are without a child, after having been given a glimpse of hope, indifferently taken away by the viccitudes of biology.

And yet I don’t regret donating my organ to Karly. She got to live the last half-a-year of her life without being on daily dialysis. She found it hard to sleep with the noise of the dialysis machine, so not having to undergo that daily was //not nothing//.

I’m going to her funeral next month. Everyone has been asked to wear pink since it was Karly’s favourite colour. I spent a nice afternoon with my partner going through charity shops looking for pink clothes that fit me. I’ve been in need of projects.

At the funeral Karl’s mum wants to give me a letter Karly wrote for me before her health took a turn for the worse, before she had to go back into the ICU, before she slipped into a coma. I know it is going to be filled with grace, hope and thankfulness. My friend JD, who was Karly’s geography teacher and also came forward to offer one of her kidneys, spent more time talking to Karly that I did. She has never used the word ‘stoic’ to describe her, but Karly’s ability to appreciate small wins really impressed itself upon her. While Karly’s parents understandably wanted her to live a long life, Karly seemed able to focus on what was immediately ahead of her and, indeed, count her blessings.

If Karly could do it considering the amount of health issues she had to suffer through, I can damn well buck up and stop moping so much! I don’t think it should be the bedrock of one’s politics, but in terms of life and how to live it, Blake was broadly right:

“Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

I can be very much like that cynical and mopey pebble, but I am trying to be more like that good-hearted and optimistic clod of clay.

RIP Karly (2008–2026)