Long Grief

At last, here so fast

Having been slow to come

Calling to me, “Play.”

Pressing, marking

Black on my soul.

A robe and worn shoe

And his last half-read book

Lie upon my floor.

Scattered pieces

Frozen in peace.

Each turn upon turn

White queen to her knight dead

Along the checkered

Slow rotting board

Looming, askew.

Finish line stretches

Into abyss of pain.

It goes and it goes.

A bitter end

That time will find.

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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Boston Med producer Terry Wrong and crew members at LA launch of The Match

Boston Med producer Terry Wrong and crew members Carl and Craig at LA launch of The Match: Complete Strangers with Tenaya Wallace of Donate Life Hollywood. Susan Whitman Helfgot was on hand signing copies of her new book which chronicles her husband's gift of a face in a historic transplant captured by ABC's Wrong last year while filming in Boston. The successful fundraiser will cover the costs of 8 documentary projects to be entered in next year's Donate Life Hollywood Film Festival.

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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I'll Bring A Side Dish...

The Thanksgiving turkey sits in another oven, our family somewhat relieved having migrated to the smells and laughter of a different home. Better to sit and watch another husband still living carve the white and dark rather than to have our table’s head occupied by a replacement.

I pondered whether to bring along the silver gravy ladle that had belonged to my great-grandmother. At first thought it seemed having the dented thing with me might sooth the continuing sensation that everything has been destroyed. I tell myself that I finally decided to leave it in the drawer so it would not be lost in the holiday frenzy. In truth, it is because I am too raw to share, too angry to have warm memories occupy another woman’s kitchen.

The four children and I will go to my husband's grave tomorrow. We will pull the soft veil from the stone and stand together. I pray the dank earth will take pity upon me, releasing my grief. I am desperately waiting.

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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UNOS Wall of Names Sun and Tears

On November 12, 2010 I visited UNOS - the national office of the United Network for Organ Sharing in Richmond. After signing copies of "The Match", its executive director Walter Graham gave me a tour of the award winning building. I watched spellbound as organ placement specialists juggled their 3 to 10 cases a day - a kidney running late from the west coast, a heart just clamped with 5 hours to make it by jet to a major medical center. Rows of clocks with various time zones from Maine to Hawaii line the walls of the nerve center.

We left the building into the warm autumn sun that reminded me why I love the South. I touched the stone etched with my husband's name - Joseph at the Wall of Names in the Memorial Garden. A small line of water ran down from the brick, left from the morning sprinklers. It seemed to be a tear.

Warmly,

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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Winning Review by Kim Bagato: The Match By Susan Whitman Helfgot and William Novak

The Match is a unique account of two lives intertwined as a result of separate tragic events. The text is laced with Susan Whitman-Helfgot’s raw and honest thoughts about her husband’s life and death. She and William Novak give readers a behind the curtain look at the lives of face transplant donor Joseph Helfgot and Jim Maki who was the recipient of Helfgot’s generosity.

In this age of lawsuits and malpractice, the credibility, enthusiasm and warmth of the surgical team are noteworthy. I’ve heard it said that we don’t realize how strong we are until we’re up against what seem to be insurmountable odds. Only then do we find the strength necessary to press on. Often that strength is gained in the company of loved ones which was the case with the Helfgot and Maki family and friends.

Joseph’s family endured tentative moments teetering on the precipice of life and death. The Maki family endured pain of a different kind when Jim sustained a life-altering fall. Horror turned to hope when Joseph’s family agreed to donate the face of their beloved husband and father for an historic transplant. Susan Whitman-Helfgot and Jim Maki are living proof that calamity can bond people for good. May the record books bear evidence of thousands of transplant recipients living better lives through the unselfish gift of organ donation.

To learn more about organ donation: Donate Life America – www.donatelife.net United Network for Organ Sharing – www.unos.org U.S. Government – www.organdonor.gov

Review by Kim Bagato

You can finally say: “I went to Harvard!”

Send in a review of The Match: Complete Strangers, A Miracle Transplant, Two Lives Transformed and an excerpt from your review will be on display at Harvard Medical School’s Joseph Martin Center this November 10.

Your name, city of origin and picture, if you so choose, will be on predominant display for guests to read as they celebrate the official Boston book launch at Harvard during our gala fundraiser celebrating Team Heart Rwanda. Susan will also send you a personally autographed copy of “The Match” if you are one of the first 10 reviewers to respond.

All reviews must be limited to 350 words and received no later than Monday, November 8 at 12 noon, EST. Have some fun. Always wanted to write a review that would put the New York Times Book Review Section to shame? Now is your chance!

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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Susan Whitman Helfgot with William Novak

"I started the book expecting to turn away. Three hours later, I set it down, in awe. ...The range of this book is astonishing... Because the focus shifts so quickly, the book reads like a thriller. And it is. But more, it’s a powerful account of people in crisis, when there’s no time to think and all you really have to go on is your character."

Jesse Kornbluth, HeadButler.com, October 20, 2010

Full Review below.

http://www.headbutler.com/books/non-fiction/match-complete-strangers-miracle-face-transplant-two-lives-transformed

We would like to thank Jesse for sharing your thoughts on The Match!

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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Simon & Schuster: A Conversation with Susan Whitman Helfgot Part 3

Q. How did you feel when viewing the “Boston Med” documentary for the first time?

A. I was sitting next to Jim Maki and Bo Pomahac and other friends from the Brigham and we watched it together. They were finally able to meet Joseph, in a way. They never knew him in life. Film is a powerful medium. Terence Wrong, the show’s producer, and his crew, captured the final images of my husband three weeks before his death. Many new organ donors have come forward because of the show. I am deeply grateful.

Q. You didn’t meet Dr. Pomahac until after your husband’s death, and yet you discovered that their backgrounds are similar. Can you elaborate?

A. Bo Pomahac came to Boston from the Czech Republic two days after graduating from medical school. He had very little money and no job. Through hard work and talent, he made his way through Boston’s closed medical community to the point where he led a team of three dozen medical professionals through one of the most difficult surgeries ever performed.

My husband grew up dirt power on the Lower East Side of New York, and after a successful career as a university professor, he managed to fight his way into Hollywood, where he built a leading movie research company that now has offices on two continents.

Q. The decision to donate Joseph’s face was one you made with all of his children. How do they feel about the choice today?

A. We are all proud that our family was able to help Jim Maki, but the resulting publicity has been difficult for them.

Q&A with Simon & Schuster

Danielle Lynn, Senior Publicist

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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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
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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
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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."

Visit us at: The Match

The Match: Complete Strangers....

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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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

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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

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Jumping with Abandon

My boys and I just returned from Purity Spring Resort, a tiny bit of heaven in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We found this spot twenty years ago and we return every year, a modern day pilgrimage. No matter how difficult or complicated, we always return. Always. A lake so clear, it is called Purity. We paddle canoes and watch beavers slide under kayaks for all too brief a time, hug and kiss friends we see only once a year while in this healing place, and then scatter, with the hope we will all make it through another year to do it all again. This year, two good men will never return. We celebrate them with joy for this perfect place.

Here is my friend Jane, a child at heart, jumping with abandon. If you don't have a lake, find one. Make it your own.

Susan Whitman-Helfgot

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The Match – AOPO Excerpts Part 4

Excerpt from prepared remarks by Susan Whitman Helfgot at the 2010 National Association of Organ Procurement Organizations recently held in Baltimore, Maryland.

... From a purely medical perspective, we know that the gift of facial tissue upon transplant ceases to be part of the donor and becomes the servant of a new master, directed by the brain which orchestrates its movements, imbuing it with new expressions, a new joie de vivre. Virtually no trace of the donor is left. But to a grieving widow, or to a mother or father, it is almost impossible to explain. So, why then, do donor families step forward and say yes? ....

AOPO's Mission

AOPO represents and serves Organ Procurement Organizations through advocacy, support, and development of activities that will maximize the availability of organs and tissues and enhance the quality, effectiveness, and integrity of the donation process.

As of July 30, 2010, 107,913 people are on the waiting list to receive the Gift of Life.

By: Susan Whitman Helfgot, Author of The Match available in bookstores & online October 12

Susan Whitman-Helfgot
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Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth.
Martin H. Fischer