A Pain in the Neck

“Dear you.” I’d been composing the letter in my head for weeks, but the first few words were the only ones I’d committed to screen.

Then they were all gone. I didn’t write any more.

They’d never been alive, really. They were five clumps of cells in vials or petri dishes. I don’t even know how they were stored. Nothing survived the thaw. What really died within 48 hours was hope I’d been hanging onto for more than six years: a feeling of assurance that I would have genetic offspring. Since my cancer became terminal cancer, I realized I would be unable to use my frozen eggs and embryos. I was donating them to two hopeful families. They were going to implant the embryos and thaw the eggs and then create embryos. The letter I had been composing was to the people that I’d expected would come from the eggs and embryos.

Sometimes I refer to the sad thing that happened in February. This was the sad thing. I don’t talk about it much.

It never occurred to me that the egg and embryo donation wouldn’t work. I guess eggs and embryos don’t thaw correctly all the time. I had been relatively healthy—at least fertility-wise—when was 35 and froze five embryos, created with my boyfriend at the time, and 11 eggs with the help of Livestrong cancer charity and NYU Langone Fertility Center. I was about to start chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for Hodgkin’s lymphoma: six months of chemo, which then turned into rounds of high-dose chemo, radiation, and a stem cell transplant that put me into early menopause.

With modern medicine, however, I could still potentially have children using the frozen embryos and eggs. A few months before I could get the green light to use the embryos, the doctors discovered that a spot that kept lighting up on my scans was a different type of cancer: neuroendocrine tumors. I had a Whipple procedure to remove the tumors and parts of my pancreas, stomach, intestines, lymph nodes, and gallbladder. It wasn’t until more than a year later that I learned my cancer wasn’t going to go away, and I would never be able to use the eggs or embryos myself. Even more recently, I had discovered my tumors are pretty aggressive. I measured my life in months.

Still, I’d had hope for the embryos. A friend even offered to carry and raise one alongside her own child, so I could be involved. My boyfriend wasn’t mentioned, because he didn’t seem to want anything to do with it. Then he disappeared as well; cut off from my savings account he regularly dipped into, he left me for an old friend of his, a recently separated Pilates studio owner he “reconnected” with on a business trip to London.

After so much time and expense—and hope—I decided to try to donate the eggs and embryos. I have to admit, it felt like something selfish. It’s always made me sad when people don’t have children. I needed to leave a genetic legacy. I wanted to be like Genghis Khan (without the pillaging) or Ben Franklin. I needed to leave something of myself behind.

When you’re told you don’t have much time to live and your boyfriend of 12 years has just left you, people are afraid to tell you no. It would have been helpful, in retrospect, to not have quite so much optimism thrown my way, but that’s hindsight after a crushing loss.

Until recently, I felt completely alone in embryo donation. I had no roadmap and I was actively discouraged by NYU. Though it’s been around for decades, embryo donation seemed like uncharted territory. Knowing that my ex didn’t want anything to do with the donation, I told NYU in June I wanted him to sign over the rights to the embryos entirely to me. Initially, they said he just had to write something on the existing contract, but when we got to the clinic, there was a lot of confusion. They sent us away and said we needed to talk to their legal team. I called repeatedly, and the NYU clinic advised me to get a lawyer and draw up a contract.

My attorney and I then spent the summer trying to follow up with them about the contract. By August, everyone was on vacation. In the meantime, my ex and I did the physical exams required by the FDA. (New York State law treats egg and embryo donation like tissue donation so you have to go through exams as if you were donating an organ, even though the material had been frozen years ago.)

In October, the clinic said I needed to speak to the on-staff psychologist. I felt like she was designated to talk me out of it. She told me that to release the embryos and eggs, I needed to have recipients—and I wouldn’t need the contract that I had paid the lawyer to draw up. Why had they told me I needed a lawyer? I asked.

“Who told you that?” she kept asking me.

“You did,” I replied. “This clinic. NYU.”

Finding someone who would want them would be difficult, she told me, especially with my cancer history. “You’re telling me that no one wants my terrible genetic material?” I asked, on the verge of tears.

“No one is saying that,” she said.

“Steve Jobs and Aretha Franklin had this cancer,” I countered. “Are you saying they shouldn’t have been born?”

I hadn’t been looking to recipients because I had been focusing on getting the rights to the embryos first. The NYU person said the only group that might want them was a Christian organization but I was put off a bit by the group, even as I asked for the necessary donation paperwork. By this time it was late November.

Search engines led me to baby sites and just a few organizations. If I couldn’t have Google to guide me, who could I trust? Frustrated, I told someone I was just going to put up fliers with my phone number to tear off at the bottom, like I was giving away kittens. Maybe I’d stand outside fertility clinics in a trenchcoat. “Hey, lady, you want some babies?”

Finally in early December, I found some Facebook groups: And the perfect recipients. I felt these families would do a better job that I even ever could.

Those little cells gave me so much comfort and insurance throughout the years. I never knew if I wanted to have children or not. I definitely felt like I needed them to make my life matter, but I didn’t yearn for babies, like some people. I always wriggle out of holding babies, tucking my arms behind me or jumping up and filling my arms with sharp objects. Babies make me nervous.

Look at this childcare situation.

As a little girl, I always preferred my stuffed animals over dolls. A photo of me when I am about two shows me “playing Mommy,” according to my mom’s caption, with a doll on the floor. Her face is covered in baby powder. I put another doll in the laundry hamper and her tangled hair stood straight up from then on. It was handy for holding her by. Perhaps I was a better cat lady, caring for my three felines.

The clinic the embryos and eggs were shipped too said there was something abnormal about the embryos and eggs. NYU had considered them a “medical freeze” and were frozen at day one instead of three or five. I never knew this. I’ll never know what went wrong and why. I still paid the same storage fee. I picture them stored in an old lunchroom freezer along with other charity jobs.

I’m not saying that NYU Langone messed up for sure. I’m just saying they were extremely obstructive and weird about the whole thing, and then nothing survived the thaw.

I felt incredible guilt for allowing the people I’d selected to receive eggs and embryos hope with me. I’ve been focused on the end of life for so long, I don’t know much about how fragile the beginnings are. I am sad that we went through this together, but I can’t think of any other people I would have rather have gone through this with: kind, compassionate, generous people I can now count as friends.

Another reason I wasn’t sure if I wanted children is the risk of having my heart out there, inside other being that I would be expected to put out in the world. How could I protect them? How could I survive the first time they’re bullied, their first heartbreak? How could I let them go? Egg and embryo donation seemed like a good compromise for me.

I found out about the embryos first; the recipient messaged me to tell me the news. I realized I was waiting all day to hear that the lab made a mistake. That call never came. Instead I got a message from the egg recipient the next day: None of the eggs had made it.

I was midway through a French cream doughnut when I opened an email from the egg recipient. That was it. After six years of mistakenly believing that I would have some sort of genetic ancestors, it evaporated in a little more than 24 hours.

I had started to eat a doughnut as one woman and finished it as another. I kept chewing, thinking about how I wish I could go back to the beginning of the doughnut. Frozen in time and hope, like the embryos.

It wasn’t the prolonged years of infertility that some face. In a way, it wasn’t even my loss. But it was packed all into one powerful punch.

I cried. I actually almost cried my eyes out. I had to go to the eye doctor because my corneas got dried out and my vision was always blurry.

Some days I couldn’t get out of bed, the heavy blanket of sorrow weighing me down. I finally had to because one of my three cats took preliminary nibbles at my inert form. He stuck his nose in my ear and up my nose. He put my heel, which was sticking out from the covers, in his mouth, his teeth gently touching my skin but not biting. Finally, he got on my headboard, like a professional wrestler mounting the ropes to finish his opponent, and launched himself onto my chest. It was time to get up and stop wallowing in my self-pity. I am still necessary to other beings.

I talked to a friend about legacy. “I know how excited you were, but I promise you you are worth way more than just your eggs or embryos,” she wrote. “You have such an impact on your friends.”

I needed an angel who needed its wings to show me my life like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. What if everyone’s life would have been better? I feel like maybe I didn’t matter.

I wanted to pass along my family stories somehow too. Over the holidays, my mom and I pulled out some of my grandmother’s handwritten recipes. On notebook paper, she’d written out her recipe for chicken paprikas and the following note to me. “Don’t be disappointed if it’s not a success—many cooks fail. Next time you’re home we can make it-—so you can really be successful. It’s easy. Good luck. Love, Grandma.” When I posted the image on Instagram, a friend who is a chef said she was going to share it with her team. Maybe those words will help a young chef whose rice burnt or whose pasta fell apart to keep going.

I wish my mom could have been a grandma. She would be good at it. People talk about her kindness as well. A friend from grade school told me that she remembered when the Care Bear craze was going on, all the stores were sold out of them. My mom, who sews a lot, made her a Care Bear so she could have one. I remember my mom even sewed those little hearts onto the bears’ bottoms.

When I was in the hospital fairly often last year, people kept trying to cheer me up with old memories. A friend took a photo of a bunch of old mix tapes I’d made him in high school and posted it. One was titled “Cool Music.” It wasn’t cool after all, looking back. I’m sorry I led him astray, but he seems to be doing OK.

I introduced a few couples, so there are a few people in the world who owe their existence to me, at least a little bit. I can claim them at some point, like Rumpelstiltskin.

Someone recently told me a quote. “There are three deaths,” writes David Eagleman in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. “The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

I’m so worried no one will speak my name. What will I leave behind? Not a computer empire or a singing career like Steve and Aretha. I have all the good people I’ve surrounded myself with.

At my living wake/extreme going-away party, I felt as if I truly had a legacy to leave behind. People left messages and spoke about how I’d affected their lives. It was the George Bailey moments I needed without the angel. People spoke of being inspired to go out and do things and enjoy life, because it’s short. I got a lot of nice feedback from people who read my New York Times op-ed and are working on relationships or starting to date. I’ve received messages from strangers about how they’ve shifted their perspective and want to enjoy and appreciate life more.

In the end, it’s not a bad legacy to leave behind.

Like the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, I am reminded, “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”