A kind man’s life is saved by kindness of strangers
One of the many reasons I love the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” is that it shows how connected we are to one another, how the goodness we do has implications that reach so far that eventually that goodness comes back around to us.
“Each man’s life touches so many other lives,” angel Clarence tells George Bailey.
Manan Reese puts it another way: We take care of each other, and if we do that we will all be OK.
“It definitely seems true in my case,” Reese, 54, said earlier this week from his room at Presbyterian Hospital, where he has been recovering nicely after undergoing a lifesaving kidney transplant Friday.
Here’s why it’s true: The man who friends say is known for his kindness to strangers was saved by the kindness of strangers — four of them — each offering to donate a kidney to him.
“None of them really knew me,” he said. “I didn’t know their last names, and they didn’t know mine, and yet they wanted to do this. It’s almost hard to get my
mind wrapped around that.” His heart is already there, though. Ask anybody about Reese, and they’ll tell you about that heart.
“He’s just the most wonderful person,” said Barbara Thomson, a teacher and Reese’s partner for four years. “He comes from a humanistic side where he just helps people. He’s done things like serve hot cocoa and sandwiches to the homeless. He carries bottles of water to give out when he sees them, buys them a meal, gives them rides to shelters or to get them food.”
Even being in the hospital has not slowed down his altruism. Flowers are not allowed in the unit where he is recovering, but Reese didn’t tell wellwishers that.
“He wanted his friends to bring flowers so he could then give them to other patients who looked like they needed cheering up,” Thomson said. “We gave away two bouquets last night.”
Reese needed a bit of cheering up himself when in March 2015 he went into kidney failure and was forced to begin dialysis three times a week. The combination of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure had taken its toll on both his body and his career as a high school teacher and college recruiter. A brother had already died of complications from diabetes. A sister had undergone a kidney and pancreas transplant. Another sibling also was diagnosed with diabetes.
By December, he was approved for a kidney transplant.
But whose kidney? Reese couldn’t bring himself to ask anybody whether they would be willing to make such a sacrifice. “For me, it was a difficult ask,” he said. Instead, he went on the waiting list for a deceased donor. The average waiting time for a kidney is three to five years, depending on blood type.
While he waited, he worked when he could as a substitute teacher and Uber driver. That’s where he met his angels.
The first one was a woman named Christine, a fellow Uber driver who had coincidentally been undergoing the rigorous process of being approved as a kidney donor for a friend. When that fell through, she texted Reese and offered her kidney to him.
“I was in shock,” he said. “I didn’t know how to respond to that. Live donors are friends, family, people who love you, who you know, not someone you met by chance.”
But in January, Christine learned she was not a match for Reese. It was devastating news.
Then came another text message, this time from another Uber driver named Florence. She was willing to donate her kidney.
“But I wasn’t ready to get back on that roller coaster,” he said. “I told her to really think about it. It’s major surgery, not something to jump into lightly.”
A day later, Florence texted again: “I want to do this. What’s our next step?”
While she underwent the battery of tests to determine whether she was a suitable match, another donor made an offer. A high school student who had heard Reese speak to her class about organ donation wanted to give him her kidney, but her mother reminded her that she was too young. The mother, however, was willing to donate her kidney if Florence turned out not to be a match.
But Florence was a match. On Friday, she made good on her gift of life to Reese. She was feeling a bit under the weather and unavailable for an interview this week.
All of this, Reese said, has changed the way he sees the world, and he hopes it helps you see it differently, too — as a place where kindness is not only given but received even among strangers, where lives connect unexpectedly, those connections in turn touching so many other lives, the goodness spooling outward like a tide, then washing back again.
That, he thinks, is pretty wonderful.