Finding a living donor involves a winnowing of the candidate pool to find the one who is best suited not only physically, but emotionally, to donate. The donor needs to be healthy and of the same blood type, and ideally needs to be proven antigenically compatible with the recipient after tissue typing. Simply put, tissue typing involves matching six antigens on the cells of both donor and recipient. If all antigens match, the graft will probably last longer than if there is no match at all. My immediate family members had themselves tested, but all except one had excess protein in their urine, a sign of potential kidney trouble that disqualified them. My brother, a strapping lad who jumps out of airplanes and climbs big rocks, would have been a fine donor, with pristine urine and three of his antigens matching mine, but since I will likely need another kidney in the future (they don't usually last a lifetime), we put him on hold.

My donor came from the faraway, open spaces of Iowa. I hadn't seen my 53-year-old aunt, Inge Grosse, in 12 years. She knew about my illness, but had only a vague idea of how far it had progressed. What would I say? 'I'd like to replace my kidney with one of yours. Could you be on the next plane to New York?' I still have the unfinished letters I tried to pen asking her for a piece of her body. They are replete with evasions and understatements: 'I am a rather sick man.'; 'I understand if you don't have the time, but would really appreciate it'; 'Don't worry. Dialysis isn't so bad.'

Eventually, I just picked up the phone and called her. She sounded the same as I'd remembered. I imagined her, a big-boned, bespectacled woman in denim and sensible shoes.

'Inge,' I said. 'Hi...'

'Eric, hi! How are you?'

'Fine, fine... Well, there's this transplant you've probably heard about..'

Whether it was our shared, albeit distant, past, or our genes, or something else that transcended family, Inge picked up the slack of my ellipsis with an orotund Midwestern laugh and said, 'It's yours already,' and flew to New York.

I spent the weeks before my surgery in the extreme reaches not only of illness, but also of experience, or consciousness--I'm not sure which. I was urinating blood, my bones ached, I slept fitfully. Yet beneath my body's unraveling was a euphoria I had never known. My eyes were windows, and what I saw through them was transposed to a higher key. I perceived rivers, trees - paper clips and doorknobs - through a nearly mystical lens. New York flickered with an aching beauty, intensely bright and significant, seemingly on the edge of dissolution. My illness was killing me inchmeal, yet I throbbed with energy, taking long bike rides through the tinted evening air, or at night, pausing to gaze at a fat moon above Central Park's lesser lights, a chance wind might lift the curtain of the quotidian to reveal something still beyond words. In retrospect, I was in part celebrating and saying goodbye to my native kidney, which would be removed; after all, what are we closer to than or own bodies?