A well-lived life after stranger’s priceless gift

Bob Mohan has died. I thought maybe I’d be writing this five years ago, but by the grace of God and a pool-repair guy named Tim, Bob got five extra years. Maybe you remember Bob Mohan. For 16 years, he was a conservative firebrand, blistering the airwaves on KFYI-AM (550) before leaving in 2002.

I met him in 2010, when he was suffering from polycystic kidney disease. Dialysis was keeping him alive but sapping him of most everything that made life worth living. Unfortunately, none of his family could give him a kidney.

“I don’t want to die yet,” he told me. “I’ve got things I want to do. I want to live. I want to go places, do things. I want to see my grandkids go to college and graduate.”

Enter Tim Gissel, who works for CDC Pools in Chandler. He showed up at Mohan’s Scottsdale home a few months later to give an estimate on a patio-remodeling job, but he wound up giving him far more than a good deal on decking. He gave Bob a kidney.

“I felt the presence of God say, ‘Do this and have faith in him,’ ” Tim told me at the time. So he did.

Bob was ecstatic. And astonished. The two men quickly became friends.

“It’ll mean a life,” Bob told me in 2012, shortly before the transplant at the Mayo Clinic. “It means freedom. It’s just unbelievable what this guy is doing for me.”

Because of Tim’s gift, Bob lived five more years, and they were good years until eight or nine months ago, when he was diagnosed with cancer in an ear. He had just three radiation treatments left when he suddenly took ill.

Last Saturday evening, Bob Mohan died, surrounded by his wife, children and grandchildren. A bacterial infection had caused his otherwise-healthy kidney to shut down, and the rest of his organs followed along, his wife, Lynda, told me. He was 80 years old.

Lynda said Bob would have died years ago without Tim’s gift. He hated dialysis — being tethered to a machine five days a week for three hours a day, and the exhaustion that followed — and would have refused to continue it.

He spent Tim’s gift of time well, she said. He lived to see one grandchild graduate two years ago and to know that the other was just weeks away from finishing up.

“Having his kidney gave him more time with his family, with his grandchildren,” Lynda said. “He was able to do things. Even at the end, when he was in pain and it was hard, he was here. He was happy being here.”

Some might say Bob was lucky. I would say he was incredibly blessed.

There are 2,036 Arizonans waiting for a kidney, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Last year, 609 Arizonans received kidney transplants. Of those, 109 came from living donors. Few, if any, came from strangers.

Thursday would have been Bob and Lynda’s 54th anniversary.

“I told Tim, ‘Thank you sounds so inadequate, but thank you,’ ” Lynda said. “How do you get the words to tell how you feel?”