On April 1, my daughter Maya went skiing in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She was 19, home on spring break from community college. She went to a resort outside of Truckee with her friends for a day of fun. It was 1992. When she arrived home early that evening, I had made a banner announcing her victory: UCLA had accepted her as a transfer student in the theater arts department with a full scholarship. Our dream had flowered into reality!

We whooped and jumped up and down outside our apartment. She propped her skis against the patio fence and came inside for an impromptu party with me and Meghan. To celebrate her achievement, she went to the Morgan Territory with friends the next afternoon. As I drove home on April 2, I was full of pride and anticipation. Hours later, I was hovering over my daughter in the ICU in a profound state of shock.

Life went into reverse. That was 32 years ago.

Maya as a teen

A Shooting Star

Now, I’m looking out over tall pines in a timeshare condo at Lake Tahoe. The sky is bright blue. There’s snow on the ground. This year, I thought going to the mountains would be a good way to spend the anniversary of Maya’s death.

Being here reminds me that she was here too just 24 hours before she fell from the back of a horse she was riding bareback in a green field decorated with spring poppies.

Maya was a shooting star. A bright light that streaked across the sky of our lives.

She left her skis with me when she got home the evening of April 1. I kept them for her. Later, when she had been dead for a year, Meghan and I moved to a condo I purchased in Walnut Creek. I took the skis with us and propped them against the garage wall. I couldn’t bear to part with them. They stood, tips pointing skyward for 12 years, a reminder of Maya.

Maya as a toddler

Watching Maya Grow

I feel lucky to have watched her grow, to have heard her first words, and watched her first steps.  At six years old, she was a dancing sprite, blond hair glistening in the sun, splashing in the Yuba River on a glorious summer afternoon. Her later self, brash and witty, made jokes at my expense. No one made me laugh like Maya did. And no one was better at pushing my buttons. Our fights were fierce, emblematic battles.

Thankfully, we made peace before she left for college. I’m grateful she lived long enough to show herself – and me – where her acting talents might take her. In Swimming with Maya, I write about those final months of her life when she aced her audition at UCLA and earned a place in their theater arts program.

A Second Chance at Life

Her fall that spring afternoon left her in an irreversible coma and made her a candidate for organ and tissue donation. By cosmic coincidence, April is National Donate Life month. On April 6 I remember my daughter as well as the recipients of her gift.

They received a second chance at life with a new heart, a new liver, or a new kidney. Maya’s corneas restored sight. And many more people received bone grafts and skin tissue.

Our “gift of life” also had an impact on Meghan, our extended family, and on me. We were able to navigate through grief knowing that a miracle had emerged from a tragedy. I hope you will consider signing a donor card to help save and improve lives. It’s easy to do. Visit the Donate Life America website to register.

Love Trumps Grief

To this day, I wish I could bring Maya back. Yet I know that’s impossible. Grief does that to you, makes you believe in all kinds of miracles. Losing Maya pushed me to the wall of what I thought I could survive, it forced me to grow up at the age of 43, to realize not everything can be fixed. I’m not in control. Life is mysterious. And yet.

When I met the man who received Maya’s heart and looked into his eyes and heard my daughter’s heartbeat two years after her death and his resurrection, I knew. Miracles happen. Recovery is possible. Love is more powerful than grief. The two are entwined in the tentacles of memory. My love for my daughter will never die.

So, I sit here in the thinner atmosphere of the mountains, celebrating Maya, in the bright blue of this day three decades after she died, our love as real as ever. I remember a summer day when she was 16 and Meghan was 8, spent here on the shores of Lake Tahoe, the three of us laughing like maniacs at Maya’s antics, beach sand between our toes, loving the beauty of the afternoon, of each other. I remind myself that love trumps grief.

When I feel all the way to the bottom of my grief, love waits for me and I embrace it.