~by Haley Lynn Gray~
My MBA from Duke. Giving birth to four children, and raising them. Donating my mother’s kidneys and corneas when she died.
Things worth doing are often the hardest to do.
The letter
Some time after my mother died, I received a letter from the man who received her kidneys.
Deciding to donate her organs was, for me, an easy decision. What was hard was making sure her wishes were actually followed — at the worst possible moment, while grieving, with people to persuade and paperwork to handle and no time at all.
Easy to decide. Difficult to execute. Those are frequently different things, and the difficulty of the second is why so many good intentions don’t survive contact with reality.
What makes hard things hard
Rarely the decision itself. Usually it’s everything around it:
The timing. Hard things arrive when you’re least equipped — during grief, during a crisis, in the middle of a week that was already full.
The admin. Meaningful decisions come wrapped in forms, phone calls and people who need convincing.
The lack of feedback. You rarely find out whether you were right. My letter arrived years later; most people never get one.
And the fact that nobody makes you. Nobody checks whether you finished the degree, had the difficult conversation, or made sure someone’s wishes were honoured.
Why they’re worth it anyway
The things on my list have one feature in common: they were all irreversible, and they all outlast me.
A man is walking around with my mother’s kidneys. Someone can see. Four people exist who wouldn’t otherwise, and are becoming their own people. The MBA changed what work was available to me for the rest of my life.
Easy things rarely have that quality. That’s usually what makes them easy.
The transferable part
Decide it once, then execute it as a series of small tasks. Hard things become manageable when they stop being one enormous thing and become a list. That’s what the spreadsheet was for when my father died.
Expect the difficulty to be in the administration. Budget time and patience for it, because nobody warns you.
Ask for help by name. Specific tasks, specific people.
And accept that you may never know if you got it right. Do the thing anyway, and let the outcome be unknown.
One practical note
If you have views about organ donation — either way — tell the people who’d be asked, and put it in writing. The decision itself was easy for me; ensuring it was honoured at the hardest possible moment was not.
The same is true of almost every wish anyone has: the conversation nobody wants to have is a gift to whoever ends up deciding.
Things worth doing are often the hardest. Do them anyway — those are the ones that remain.
