To the Stranger Stepping Up to Save My Son’s Life

I will not bore you with thank yous or the usual “words are not enough to express my gratitude” because these lines are so overused they’re ripe for extinction.

Allow me instead to tell you a story.

My son was born eight years ago under a dark cloud that I promised myself I’d get around to dispersing one day. I kept putting it off, and putting it off, until I eventually forgot about it, and now he might be dying.

Before your imagination runs wild, I should clarify that the “dark cloud” is just that he got me for a mother. And no one else. That his world was always smaller than it should’ve been, even though his origins were rich and incredible.

In some ways he was born out of war. The coda to a reporting stint in Ukraine during which human life seemed to lose all value, because little kids were being reduced to meat by Russian bombs as they walked along the streets in the Donbas, and those who were not got used to riding their bikes along roads littered with landmines

This is where Aedrik Marlow Quinn made his entrance, weighing in at exactly 5 pounds at a Kyiv maternity hospital. He had no idea of the bloodshed and brutality eating away in the other side of the country. Or that his mother had been plotting increasingly harebrained ways to get herself killed when he came along and changed things. Suddenly there was life, and death was ugly and desperate and trying too hard.

He asked for nothing but deserved everything, giggling his way through milestones and washing the world in endless new shades of color. Demanding tickle fights and Nerf battles and reminding me, through quips and barbs and “Let’s play now,” that laughter is all that really matters.

You’d never guess that the odds were always stacked against him. He never complained when his family tree turned out smaller than everyone else’s at school, when he had to explain to the class that his immediate family includes only a mom, a dog, and a cat. I still remember my shock and dismay upon learning he was considered an “at-risk youth” simply for coming from a single parent household. He never had the benefit of two pairs of hands to console him, two warm beating hearts to set the rhythm for his sleep.

Just a mom who could never stop looking at the contours of his face and watching the rise and fall of his breathing.

Eight years on and his world should be getting bigger but it’s the size of a pea and it might fade to nothing. Jiu-jitsu and breakdancing and gel blasters are suddenly things enjoyed by another little boy, the one he used to be, the one he was just six months ago. Before we learned a genetic glitch had messed up his expiration date, handing his life over to a cruel disease called adrenoleukodystrophy. Without a bone marrow transplant, he will waste away as the disease ravages his brain and probably never live to see his 10th birthday.

But this is where you come in, whoever you are. You’ve apparently agreed to an act of self-sacrifice for a little boy you’ve never seen and will never know. Namelessly, probably even a bit casually, you might be saving both his life and mine by donating your bone marrow.

You’ve made his world bigger and brighter.

“Someone, somewhere, is going to let doctors stick a massive needle into their bones to help you,” I told him when word came that we’d found a donor.

“Why?”

“They must think you’re pretty cool, that’s why. Why not?”

“Who is it?”

“No idea. It’s kept secret. It could be anybody.”

Being a single parent means constantly scanning for the slightest sign of anything that might hurt your child. Drawing up worst-case scenarios and contingency plans and setting traps to mask that you’re a one-person army.

I’ve spent years preparing for various kinds of mistreatment. School bullies, backstabbing friends. I’ve worried about how he’d navigate cruelty, if he’d let it sink in till it left a stain or find a way to shrug it off. It wasn’t too long ago that I envisioned how he’d react to mockery by his peers, a strong possibility in his future should he survive his transplant but be left with related complications.

I pictured how his face would contort, the corners of his mouth tugged inward and down, the brief pooling in his eyes before a sudden flash of resolve and then hardening of the soul.

I never imagined the opposite. His face a flash of light, eyes dancing in step with his mouth, as he learns some stranger somewhere wants a world with him in it.