Before my nineteen-year-old died he gave his heart to an eighteen-year-old girl. At his funeral her mother handed me a letter he had written three weeks earlier.

PART 1 — THE ENVELOPE

Tobiah died in 2011 and after that it was me and Cael.

Fourteen years of the two of us in a house on Wrackham Hill.

A year ago he was nineteen and completely well. He was doing a plumbing apprenticeship and he ate like a horse and he beat me at cards.

Then one afternoon in the February he went dizzy in the kitchen and went down, and hit the corner of the counter on the way.

Six weeks of tests. Then a consultant at Penhale General sat us in a side room and used the words progressive and neurological and no cure.

I did not accept it. I am not going to pretend I handled it well.

I sold the car. I sold my mother's gold, which I had kept since 1998. I rang clinics in three countries. I raised eleven thousand pounds at a church hall in the April and I would have raised eleven thousand more.

None of it worked. He got weaker all year.

I had already buried a husband. I could not find any way to be told I was going to bury the boy as well and be left with nobody at all.

I had him grown up in my head. Married. A house. Children who called me nan.

Then one evening in the October he took my hand in that room.

"Mum. I want to do something useful. If I can, I want somebody to have my heart."

I looked at him.

"Please. If I'm going anyway, let it be the last thing. I've already asked the doctor. He says it can be done."

I cried and he waited and in the end I nodded.

He died on the ninth of November. He was nineteen and two months.

His heart went to an eighteen-year-old girl about ninety miles away.

At the funeral, in the hall afterward with about forty people and two tea urns, a woman I had never seen in my life came across to me.

Mid-forties. Good coat that had been good about ten years ago. She was shaking.

"Mrs. Sayer. My daughter has your son's heart."

I could not make a sentence.

She had an envelope in both hands and she held it out.

"He asked me to give you this. Three weeks ago."

I took it and I knew the handwriting before I had it the right way up.

"You knew him?"

And she said:

"Every Tuesday and Thursday."

I opened it standing up, in a church hall, with a cup of tea going cold on a trestle table next to me.

The first line says:

Mum, there's something you need to know about her.

PART 2 — THE CHURCH HALL

In the April I did the fundraiser.

About forty people in that same hall. A raffle, a cake stall, my sister on the door.

Eleven thousand and forty pounds, for a treatment programme abroad, and I was so proud of that number I could have burst.

Cael was there in the chair. He was still walking a bit then but not for a whole afternoon.

At the end I stood up to say the total, and he put his hand up.

He had a folded piece of paper. He wanted to say something.

And I went over and took it out of his hand.

I did not snatch it. I crouched down beside that chair and took it gently and put it in my own cardigan pocket, and I said, to a room of forty people, in the voice you use:

"Give me that, love. You're tired. Let me do it — nobody wants to see you upset in front of everyone."

And people made a sound. That warm, sympathetic sound a room makes.

Somebody said, "Bless him."

My sister said, "She's right, Cael, sit back."

Nobody said one word to stop me. Why would they. I was his mother and I was being kind.

He put his hand down and he sat back.

And I did the announcement and everybody clapped.

I found that folded paper in the cardigan about a week later and by then I had no idea what it had been for, and I threw it out with the tissues in the pocket.

PART 3 — TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS

The letter is four pages.

In the March, five weeks before that fundraiser, the programme abroad turned him down.

They wrote to the consultant, not to me. The consultant told Cael, in an appointment I was not at because I was at work.

He was nineteen and he asked the consultant to let the Tuesday and Thursday appointments stay in the diary.

Not to lie to me exactly. Because, he writes, if the appointments stopped I would have had nothing to do, and he had watched what I was like on the days I had nothing to do.

So twice a week for seven months I drove my son to Penhale General and dropped him at the main doors and went to work, and picked him up at five.

He did not go to a clinic.

He went to the fourth floor and sat with a girl called Astrid Lunde, who is eighteen and who had been on the cardiac list since 2023, and who had almost no visitors, because her mother Margit works nights at a distribution centre and days at a school and could not be there.

Seven months. Two afternoons a week.

He never once told me.

And I never once asked him what he did up there, because I already thought I knew.

PART 4 — WHY HER

Here is what the letter actually says, and it is not what anybody expects.

He did not have a noble idea about donation.

He writes: I didn't want to give my heart to somebody. I wanted to give it to her.

He had sat next to a girl for seven months who was dying of exactly the one thing that was still working in him.

He writes that he asked the coordinator whether you could choose, and was told properly and repeatedly that you cannot, that it does not work like that, that it goes on the list.

He asked anyway. Four times.

And then he says the thing I have had to sit with.

It was going to work out or it wasn't. But I wasn't going to be the one who didn't ask.

It did work out, and that is a matter of blood group and tissue match and a girl being ninety miles away at the top of an urgent list, and it is coincidence and nothing else, and the coordinator has told me so.

He also writes that he told Margit Lunde in a corridor three weeks before he died, and gave her the envelope, and asked her not to tell Astrid anything at all.

Astrid did not know. Not that afternoon, not for weeks after. She knew a boy called Cael who came on Tuesdays and Thursdays and who stopped coming in the November.

And the last page is about the hall in April.

I tried to tell you at the fundraiser. I had it written down because I knew I'd make a mess of it.

PART 5 — THE FOURTH FLOOR

Astrid is nineteen now. She got through the first year, which is the one that matters most.

We met in the February, in Margit's front room, with a plate of biscuits nobody touched.

She is funny in a dry way that I recognised inside about four minutes, and I had to go out to the car for a bit.

She did not know what he had done. Margit told her in the January, when she was strong enough, and she has had a very hard time with it and she is seeing somebody about it and that is exactly right.

She has said one thing to me that I hold onto.

She said, "He never once talked about being ill. I talked about being ill for seven months and he never said a word about his."

I go over about once a month. Margit and I are, improbably, friends. She is forty-six and she has worked two jobs since 2019 and she carried a sealed envelope round with her for three weeks.

The eleven thousand and forty pounds is in an account. I could not spend it and I could not give it back, and in the end Margit and I put it into a thing at Penhale for the fourth floor, so there is somebody paid to sit with the ones who do not get visitors.

Give me that, love. You're tired. Let me do it.

I said that. Not a mother-in-law, not a stranger. Me, crouched down by my own son's chair in a church hall, in front of forty people who all thought I was being wonderful.

And somebody said bless him, and my sister told him to sit back, and everybody clapped for me, and he put his hand down.

He was not tired.

He had four pages to tell me and he had written the first bit out because he knew he would make a mess of it, and I put it in my cardigan pocket and threw it away a week later with a tissue.