COVID is Over… but Daniel’s Story Lives On
Note — this column was started in October of 2022 and finished in April of 2023. It was published on the 3-year anniversary of Daniel’s death.
I began to write this from Athens about beginnings and ends, the Alpha and Omega. But I was actually not in Athens, Greece… just in northeast Georgia :) Life has balance, and the Omega of Daniel’s death led to an amazing Alpha for another. But first let us deal with the darkness before we look to the light.
Omega
I started this column on my first visit to UGA since the low point of my grieving process. In May of 2020 we came to my son’s apartment to clean out his stuff. The finality of the loss all was never more in my mind as when we dismantled his room. After we finished, I drove to picturesque downtown Athens to drop off some paperwork and his key. It was glorious spring day and there were some students walking around. There are very few things more optimistic and full of life than watching a college campus, even in a pandemic. The contrast between emptying a dead son’s bedroom and seeing happy smiles and the future on those former classmates’ faces was too much. I sat in my car alone and bawled like a baby for an eternity before I pushed the start button and headed back home.
That memory came very early in COVID, and until now the loss of Dnaiel had been a total overlap with our shared viral nightmare. But now the pandemic is over and has been for a while. I don’t care what anyone’s official status is or was, or about the remaining CYA “wear a mask” signs — from a practical view, life now looks exactly like 2019. It’s done.
Watching the pandemic fade and seeing everyone back to normal left me in an odd mental state. I am naturally easy going, but have been way more grumpy recently. Sadly I now sometimes have a hair trigger over stupid or meaningless things. I am pretty sure this is my irrational rage at the virus and occasionally take it out on the world.
Imagine you are a 20-year-old young man in April of 2020 who has been fighting depression alone. You have shared it with no one and performed a world-class acting job so good that when your best friends and family later get that awful phone call they are completely stunned. You are recalled from your UGA apartment to be locked at home with the parents. Your brothers have their own apartment but not room for you. You can’t go to the gym — which is where you work out negative emotions. You can’t be with friends. The news is telling you that the economy is permanently destroyed, there will be no jobs, and you are living in the apocalypse with no expiration date. The outside world is flooded in bitter negativity and pessimism. How does that affect a deadly internal decision process that is fueled by mental illness?
That has led to my internal but entirely pointless mental debate. Did Daniel “die of COVID?” To this day there remains controversy about what was a COVID death. If an 85-year-old with three chronic diseases died while infected, was that “from COVID?” If there was no pandemic, would my son be here today texting me about the upcoming NFL draft? Would he have reached out for help before it was too late? Would he have even descended to that darkest of places at all? Nobody knows, nor could they know. And it absolutely doesn’t matter. But it pisses me off. To hell with the virus, the overwhelming negativity from the media, and overreaction from our governments. And especially to hell with the Chinese if they leaked it. I for one stamp a “COVID asterisk” on the cause of death for my son.
To summarize where I am at this point, I will give you the best mental picture that I have heard yet describing the life of those who have lost a child to suicide. It is based on a passage in Ivan Maisel’s incredibly relatable story of the loss of his son, I Keep Trying To Catch His Eye. Your own life is like a beautiful vase that is shattered by the loss. You then glue the pieces together the best you can. The result — a new life that looks very much like the old one but with permanent imperfections that are now part of the new you. From far away most people can’t see the cracks, but those closest to you can.
Well enough of all that. It is time to leave the past to the past and share the good news!
Alpha
I promise there is an amazing Alpha coming but the background is still tough…
After Daniel had been in ICU for 2 weeks, it became clear that his brain damage was overwhelming and irreversible, and we wanted him to be an organ donor. However, the donor evaluation using hastily thrown together COVID protocols came back that he was not a candidate. We reluctantly decided to terminate life support.
Then just a day or so before we were going to let him go, amazingly a doctor at North Fulton who wasn’t even on Daniel’s case heard about this. He told the ICU nurses that he thought that the determination that Daniel could not be an organ donor was a mistake. Word of that got back to us through hospital gossip, and we contacted the doctor. It was at this same time that we found Daniel’s suicide note. In it, he made it clear he wished to be an organ donor. This doctor then arranged his own more valid test, and Daniel easily passed. At 1:35pm on April 25, 2020, an organ donor liaison read the following tribute in the operating room:
Surgeons then took his kidneys, heart, and liver. His heart went to a 30-year-old North Carolina woman, and his kidney’s to two Georgia fathers. The story of the liver follows and it is life affirming.
Organ donation is like many adoptions — all records are sealed. Neither side knows who gave or who received. You can, however, send quasi anonymous letters or cards through a 3rd party. We had sent Holiday cards to his recipients in 2020 and 2021 but received nothing.
Then in spring of 2022 we received a card from the liver recipient, Mearle. It mentioned watching an enclosed video on a thumb drive. That thumb drive had been confiscated.
After a few months of notarized paperwork bureaucracy on both sides, we finally were able to get each other’s contact information. I then received the video. The first frame showed a middle-aged man from Dahlonega sitting on a couch. And he was wearing a hat. Daniel’s hat.
I pressed pause and teared up even before watching the video. Daniel had worn a smilar black style Falcons hat non-stop, and it is not the common one in the fan base. And his story was even more uncommon.
His was a journey of faith and redemption.
Mearle’s story picked up in his late 40s, married with one teenage daughter. He was an over the top Falcons fan, spending whole weekends for home games in tailgate mode, including a lot of drinking. That wasn’t the only drinking excess either. It was putting his marriage, job, and family in jeopardy. He had no significant faith life.
Then his liver shut down. Doctors told him to get his affairs in order and he went home most likely to die. After several months his belly started to swell up with liters of fluid that had to be drained weekly. He had little strength, and little hope.
During this bleak time Mearle began going to church. The pastor prayed for him and assured him that God had a plan for him. He then got baptized, and almost immediately his fluid problem got dramatically better. Slowly some strength and hope returned. But without a transplant he would eventually have died.
Then a phone call came late on an April evening, and the next day a liver went from one die-hard Falcons fan at North Fulton Hospital in Roswell to another one at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta.
Mearle then had an almost miraculously problem-free recovery, went back to work, and restored his family relationships. He spends much of his time now sharing his testimony about how God saved him and gave him a path to redemption.
Lori and I had lunch with Mearle and his wife Donna for lunch last fall. The words “mixed emotions” don’t do justice to how we felt at this meeting. There were tears of joy and sadness. Mearle shared in person his incredibly powerful story of redemption, a new lease on life, and the power of God. There is no doubt that an amazingly positive thing was crafted out of the ugly abyss of suicide. Omega begets Alpha. My favorite thing from our lunch was when Mearle told us that his daughter wanted to be there but couldn’t because of college classes. But she wanted to pass on a message. “Thank you for giving me my father back.”
The God moments keep coming for this journey that now invovles both our families. Just today Mearle and I met to get the above picture at the Dawsonville Starbucks, over 30 miles from where my wife and I raised our boys. A young man I did not know came up to us and said “Are you Mr. Dudgeon? I was a friend of Daniel’s from high school and college.” I said yes, and introduced him to the man who received the gift of his liver.
During Daniel’s time in ICU, we and thousands of others who followed his journey through social media prayed for a miracle. The one we wanted was for Daniel to come back to us. Instead, God delivered the miracle of Mearle.
If you are not already committed to organ donation for yourself or family should the circumstances arise, I cannot encourage you enough to do so.