Would You Want Your Organs Saving Someone You Hate?
Two travelers, one Assata Shakur shirt, and a conversation that cut straight to life, death, and who deserves to live on through us.
I met Hess at the Bangkok airport, a woman with an Assata Shakur shirt on, and I knew right away I had to say something. There are certain shirts you don’t walk past when you’re away from home. They’re beacons in a way. Not just cotton with ink. It’s declaration, alignment, history, familiarity stitched into the seams. So I did what felt good: invited her into the lounge with me. My credit card lets me bring one extra person, and if I’m already paying these damn dues, why not make it count? Plus, something in me knew this wasn’t the type of human I’d meet, nod at, and forget.
She’d been out in the world, traveling just for the hell of it. No grand reason, no curated Instagram narrative, just moving. Her time was up, though. She had to head back to the States. Needed to refill the money bag to get back out here, maybe to India next time. Also, her father-in-law had been sick, navigating years of illnesses, and she wanted to be there for him. The way travel calls us, but so does duty, and we’re always caught in between.
As all conversations eventually do, ours circled around to death. Fitting, given her shirt. We were both long-time students of Assata Shakur, and the news of her death sat heavy on our chests. It was grief, yes, but not the usual kind. It was grief braided with relief. Relief that Assata was never dragged back into the system that had tried so hard to cage her. That system still hates her. Still hates us. We said her name softly, the way you say an ancestor’s name when you know they’re listening.
Then Hess asked me if I was an organ donor. I laughed, because that question almost always comes with some kind of conspiracy theory, or the echoes of family warnings passed down: “Doctors won’t save you if they know they can use your parts.” I’ve heard it too many times. I told her yes, absolutely. It’s on my license, and I’ve made it clear to every family member who might one day be faced with the choice.
She wasn’t. She said she’d hate for her beautiful, well-kept organs to end up in the body of someone she’d curse in life. And I understood. She told me about her cousin. How their lungs or heart (she couldn’t remember which) ended up saving the life of a cop. A cop who might’ve gone back out into the world to enforce the very system her cousin spent their life fighting against. That thought still haunted her, and I couldn’t argue with it.
Because truth is, I have my own list of people I wouldn’t want carrying pieces of me inside them. I don’t want some racist ex-judge seeing the kindness of the world through my corneas after spending decades sentencing Black kids to rot in cages for profit. I don’t want a man who beat his wife walking around with my liver, getting a second chance at life when he spent his first one inflicting pain. I don’t want my heart pulsing inside the chest of someone who voted against every human right I hold dear while their lover lays their head there, listening and smiling. Hell, imagine my pancreas going to that woman who wilded out in Starbucks recently, traumatizing the barista because they didn’t call out a name that wasn’t even hers.
But here’s the thing: as much as I could spin myself into knots thinking about who shouldn’t get my organs, I can’t ignore who could. Maybe my kidneys give life to some dad who just wants to take one more cross-country road trip with his sons, windows down, music blasting, on the way to Great Sand Dunes. Maybe my lungs end up in someone who’s always dreamed of playing the tenor sax, not for fame, not for money, but just to play “In a Sentimental Mood” because it was their grandma’s favorite song. Maybe my heart finds a home in a young woman who wants nothing more than to live long enough to dance at her sister’s wedding, barefoot in the grass, wine in her hand, joy in her chest.
That’s what I have to hope for. That my pieces land with the people who’ll stretch them into something bigger than me, something worth saving.
We sat there in the lounge, peeling bananas that tasted like they grew up next to sugarcane farms, tossing the skins aside, and swapping stories. Talked about how close we both came to meeting Assata, the kind of “almost” you carry forever. We sighed about Queen & Slim and how they should’ve made it to Cuba, at least in fiction. We shared that quiet traveler’s hope of crossing paths again somewhere in the wide, spinning world while these organs, hers and mine, are still carrying us forward.
What struck me most about her wasn’t the stories, or even the shirt. It was the way she held contradictions without trying to force them to make sense. She didn’t believe in organ donation, and I did. She mourned Assata but also celebrated her freedom. She loved being out in the world but knew she had to go home. There was no neat bow, no final answer. Just life, as messy and complicated as it comes.
Walking out of that lounge, I thought about how many strangers I’ve met like Hess. People who flicker into your life for an hour or two, and then vanish. But some of them stay. They stay in the way you think about organ donation, or the way you peel a banana, or the way you whisper a name like a prayer. They stay in your bloodstream, no surgery required.
If my heart does end up in someone else’s chest, I hope it still knows how to make room for people like her. People who believe in the possibility of another world, even if they’re just passing through the airport on their way back to the grind. People who wear shirts that speak louder than words. People who remind me that even small choices like a lounge invitation and a conversation can feel like freedom, however temporary.
Maybe that’s the point of organ donation after all. Not the science, not the politics, not even the body count of who deserves it and who doesn’t. But the quiet, stubborn belief that something of us can keep going, inside someone else, in ways we’ll never see.
And maybe the only way to live with all the contradictions is to lean into them. To trust that even if some cop somewhere is breathing with her cousin’s lungs, somebody else out there is playing sax with mine.
What a very odd and yet I found quite interesting read.