Simon and Schuster: A Conversation with Susan Whitman Helfgot Part 2

Q. Your mother-in-law, Rachel, endured tremendous hardships, and you describe her as one of the toughest women you’ve ever known. How did her tenacity influence Joseph while he was in and out of hospitals?

A. Joseph’s parents were survivors of Auschwitz, living under the most extreme conditions a human being can endure. Every day they made a conscious choice to stay alive and, somehow, they were able to. Joseph’s mother taught her son -- and taught me, as well -- everything there is to know about hope in the face of terrible odds. Joseph was very brave, and one definition of bravery is finding hope in action.

Q. What would you say to a healthy young person who’s getting a driver’s license and deciding whether or not to be an organ donor?

A. There’s a popular bumper sticker: “Don’t take your organs to heaven. Heaven knows we need them here.” Very few of us ever have an opportunity to save a life, but knowing that your death could save the life of another person is a powerful idea. And knowing that the death of a loved one has brought life to somebody else has provided great solace to many grieving families.

Q&A with Simon & Schuster

Danielle Lynn, Senior Publicist

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
http://thematchstory.com/
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Click on the tour dates tab from The Match Story fan page, to find your local book signing and updated information. http://bit.ly/bv3Itq

Simon & Schuster: A Conversation with Susan Whitman Helfgot Part 1

Q. What was your motivation in writing this book?

A. When The Boston Globe reported that my husband had been the donor for Jim Maki’s face transplant, I was approached about the rights to my story. I remember thinking that this isn’t my story. It belongs to my late husband, to Jim Maki, and to Bo Pomahac, the transplant surgeon. My attorney suggested that I keep a diary. Then I got to know Jim and Bo, and several other people who were intimately connected to the transplant, and my diary morphed into a book with the help of William Novak.

Q. How did Joseph’s medical treatments convince him—and you—of the importance of organ donation?

A. My husband, Joseph, waited for years for a new heart, but only about a third of those in that situation ever receive one. The rest die waiting. Right now, more than 100,000 people in this country alone are waiting for some type of solid organ transplant, but only about a quarter of them will get new organs this year. Potential recipients are on death row, hoping for the phone to ring. Without more donors, they will continue to die, waiting for the call.

Q&A with Simon & Schuster

Danielle Lynn, Senior Publicist

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
http://thematchstory.com/
http://www.facebook.com/thematchstory
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http://www.youtube.com/swhelfgot

Weekly Allowance and a Bailout

My son, Jacob, came to me on Wednesday looking for his weekly allowance. "Mom, I need my stimulus package," he said. "Will this trickle down?" I asked him. "Mommmm...." I continued, "stimulus means something designed to accelerate the economy. As in jobs. As in, will you actually walk the dog when you are supposed to every night?" "Sure, mom." I came in last night after walking the dog for the third night in a row. "Hi mom," said Jacob. "I need a bailout."

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The Match: Complete Strangers....

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
http://thematchstory.com/
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Florida Clouds

We called them “Florida Clouds” when I was a girl in Fort Lauderdale in 1968, huge billowing white balls of humidity spun up into tall skyscrapers that would march east from the Everglades in a late afternoon, exhausting themselves in heavy sheets of liquid pelting my bedroom windows. I was among them again today as my plane climbed into the sky leaving south Florida through the ghostlike wonders, childhood memories close as I flew through narrow canyons carved between mountains of white.

My father came home early one day in my junior year of high school to tell us he was moving the family to Boston. I left behind my sweet, doting boyfriend and my rat pack of girlfriends uniformly attired in extra-large BVD men’s tees with only bathing suits underneath, never again to taste the world’s best French fries from the locally owned Apothecary Shop or to steal puffs from lit cigarettes gladly offered by the older boys at the beach on Saturday afternoons.

I have returned here often, but rarely voluntarily. As a child, the beach stretched long and clean and safe, overrun one week a year with college kids who broke up the monotonous ebb and flow of the sleepy shoreline town just up a way from Miami on State Road 7. That Ft. Lauderdale died years ago, and now discontent, lost dreams and hopelessness oozes up from gridlocked burning macadam.

A decade later, I returned with my husband over and over again to care for my mother-in-law who suffered from Alzheimer’s until I finally came to loathe the place, the very place that had once loved me and raised me and then had washed away with the tide.

This week I returned again to help bury my cousin’s son, just shy of age 20, so young still, so innocent, who drowned in this place in a dark canal in the dead of night. I watched the strip of beach fall away from 17,000 feet and wondered what thing might next bring me back.

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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Let your parents know you love them

I'm sitting at Logan Airport in Boston, grounded, waiting for thunderstorms to pass. Today my son, Jacob, left for his first day as a sophomore in high school as I was jumping into a taxi. I am on my way to Palm Beach to attend a funeral. My cousin's son died in a accident, drowning when his car skidded into a canal late at night. He was much too young to die. My cousin and his wife are heartbroken.

Every day, we live on borrowed time taken from the fabric of a universe so enormous and complex that we can only begin to wonder at what power could have possibly created such a miracle.

If you have parents living nearby or with you, stop what you are doing and go hug them right away, or call them if they are far from you. No one should ever have to lose a child. Let your parents know that you love them. Time is short.

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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Chapter 1 of The Match- The First 1000 Words http://bit.ly/9KLmrW

The Match: A Brief Description

Joseph Helfgot, the son of Holocaust survivors, worked his way from a Lower East Side tenement to create a successful Hollywood research company. But his heart was failing. After months of waiting for a heart transplant, he died during the operation.

Hours after his death, his wife Susan was asked a shocking question: would she donate her husband's face to a total stranger?

The stranger was James Maki, the adopted son of parents who spent part of World War II in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Rebelling against his stern father, a professor, by enlisting to serve in Vietnam, he returned home a broken man, addicted to drugs. One night he fell facedown onto the electrified third rail of a Boston subway track.

A young Czech surgeon who was determined to make a better life on the other side of the Iron Curtain was on call when the ambulance brought Maki to the hospital. Although Dr. Bohdan Pomahac gave him little chance of survival, Maki battled back. He was sober and grateful for a second chance, but he became a recluse, a man without a face. His only hope was a controversial face transplant, and Dr. Pomahac made it happen.

In The Match, Susan Whitman Helfgot captures decades of drama and history, taking us from Warsaw to Japan, from New York to Hollywood. Through wars and immigration, poverty and persecution, from a medieval cadaver dissection to a stunning seventeen-hour face transplant, she weaves together the story of people forever intertwined—a triumphant legacy of hope.

Susan Whitman Helfgot

Author, The Match

http://thematchstory.com/
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Disabled American Veterans - It takes more than wishes to make a change

I was in New York yesterday, dropping off my son at college and meeting with a few people about The Match. It was unbelievably hot as I walked down 5th Avenue in the brilliant sun, and I turned onto a side street in the high 20s, zigzagging my way across town, trying to find shade.

A wrought iron fence came up to meet me, filled with hundreds of yellow ribbons, each carefully tied and tagged with the name of a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan. Brown, Fischer, Garcia and Georgeopolis, they were all there. Some had been tagged with a note. One read, "Remember when we were young and love was all we knew". Some of the soldiers had died and pictures framed in black were stapled to their ribbons.

Thousands of soldiers have returned home, and many more will follow. Almost all are struggling to survive new battles; some suffer the loss of a hand, or leg or a portion of a face. Others struggle to survive battles invisible to the naked eye, a nightmare terror that comes again and again, or sleepless nights wondering how they will ever find a job to feed their family. It saddens me that we have not yet found peace on our fragile planet. Even more sad is the knowledge that fixing what is wrong seems almost impossible and will take much more than just wishing it could be another way.

If you haven't yet found a way to become engaged, please find a small project or make a modest donation on behalf of of the servicewomen and men who have suffered on our behalf. For more information please visit Disabled American Veterans http://www.dav.org/

Susan Whitman Helfgot

Author, The Match

http://thematchstory.com/
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