With All of My Parts
By Becks Simpson
April 15, 2026
April 15, 2026
The first letter arrives two weeks after the funeral. White envelope, government-stamped and official on the outside, something else on the inside. Holding it in her hands stings like that choice she made at the hospital so she tosses it on the kitchen bench as if discarding a smoldering match, away from the pile of medical forms, separate from the stack of condolences. They said these letters would come, but she didn’t expect something so soon. The thought of opening it needles her ribs like a bruise, a sickly sweet gratitude shoved in her face, and her stomach twists sideways. She has to get away from it even if it’s just her and the house.
She moves to the next room, hoping the small distance will help to pull away from its tragic gravity. She’s not ready. She needs something easier, like the grit on the bookcase. Brushing around the tiny ornaments and frayed books, it’s a mindless thing she barely had time to do while he was alive. A smooth, unassuming rock falls to the floor with a dull thud, worn and grey as she feels. She bends to pick it up, and the touch of it pulls her sideways into memory, a riptide she’s too tired to fight.
They were coming back from a camping trip at the beach. She was the one packing away all the gear, the tent, the sleeping bags while he stood down at the shoreline watching the waves crash over and over. It was his safe place. The roiling of foam tips and soft whooshing of falling turquoise crescents mesmerized him, calmed that perpetually agitated part inside. She was relieved for the peace as well, for both of them. There would certainly be enough stress and aggravation to come once they left. When she found him on the sand, standing stoic and unflinching against the ragged sea breeze like he too was made from that same worn stone, she didn’t want to disturb him. It broke her heart to make him leave this place. She swore he loved it more than her even though she was his mother.
“C’mon sweet heart, time to go,” she whispered, rubbing his back to bring him back to the present without overstimulating.
She remembers the conversation in the car that followed. The poor job she did of convincing him that they’d be back soon enough. With his condition, the countless blood draws, shifting medication regime, she wasn’t even sure anymore. She wanted to lie for both of them. She wished she could look him in the face and believe herself when she said they’d come back. But she couldn’t, and she should’ve known what that would do to him. When they stopped to get gas, and she got out to pay, it was only a few minutes, but he’d run off.
She cursed herself, cursed her carelessness. All the should-haves swept through her head like a screeching wind. Why did she leave him alone in the car? Because she didn’t want him set off by something in the store? Stupid. Stupid. He wasn’t fit to be by himself. It was dangerous for him. And now he was lost. Stupid. The voice inside screamed but her homing beacon already knew where he was.
“I wanted to breathe in the sea air so I can carry it in my lungs in case we don’t come back,” his soft voice didn’t match his bear-like size, and seemed out of place against his clenching and unclenching fists. Of course he was back at the beach. Part of her wished she could leave him there, to turn into a granite fixture, permanently enthralled by the waves. It would have been a blessing for them both in some ways. That’s when she had seen the rock, almost perfectly round, and a texture he would adore too.
“Here, we’ll take some of the beach back with us, ok?” she pressed it into his hand and watched as his shoulders relaxed and his thumb began to slide back and forth over the stone, sending a message to his brain that it would be alright for them to go home.
Now, with him gone, her hand brushes the stone again, and the memory paints itself across her fingertips. She presses it tight in her palm until the ache settles, then slips it in her pocket. A piece of him to carry with her a little longer.
~~~
Days later, she returns home from a grocery trip. The sun is high and hot, a breeze fanning the neighborhood to stop the heat from settling. A relaxed, lazy air hangs between the spread out brick houses. It’s beautiful in a way that feels wrong. There was an ease to the outing that she settled into too quickly. No planning to avoid meltdowns, no managing overstimulation, but the loneliness greeting her at the front door sulks like a betrayal.
The mailbox is bloated with catalogues and mismatched envelopes. Grabbing the handful, one falls loose, as though it wants to implode and pull the air from her lungs. She can tell it’s the same ilk as the other letter—a thank-you she doesn’t deserve. When she finally picks it up, its weight and shape tell her it’s a card before her mind can stop itself.
She remembers a day they had gone to the newsagency. She was looking for something nice to congratulate a friend so was content to let him roam the aisles a little.
“From the bottom of my heart,” his deliberate voice read next to her once he’d circled back. It had taken him longer than others to learn to read but when he cracked it as a teenager, he read everything, afraid he’d forget how if he didn’t. The turns of phrase tickled his brain. They were curious, mysterious. Why the heart? Why not the other bits? Intestines or brain which have even more volume for love? Or ‘from my ankles up’? He explained how that would cover the whole body and be a larger container than the heart. She didn’t have an answer, probably because there wasn’t a good reason—language wasn’t practical and ordered the way his thoughts were. He kept moving, gentle fingers tracing the words on each card meticulously until the end of the aisle where she’d found what she was looking for.
“Well, I love you with my heart” he said, a concentrated look threading his thin eyebrows together, “and all the other pieces, mum.” Me too, she told him. It became an insider message between them, once he finished growing up. Love was still complicated for him to express so he would just say ‘All of my parts, mum’ and it felt as good as a hug.
Back in the sun, she’s still holding the envelope, light leaking through it like an x-ray. The faint outline of golden, embossed words—something resembling ‘for your gift’—flickers through the paper. Her eyes snap away, blurred and suddenly wet at this weird consolation prize no parent should ever have to receive. She tightens her grip on the envelope. Why does she hate this so much? She had done the right thing. A fierce, unreasonable thought blooms under her ribs. The right thing for who?
~~~
The third and fourth letters arrive a week later. Thin, polite and patient. Handed to her by the postman to whom her son loved to wave. Their kind postman who knows better than to ask where her son is now. He just fixes her with a tight-lipped smile and eyes that brim with sad understanding. She wants to thank him but the words are stuck.
She stacks the letters on the others, adding to the weight of their waiting. They sit like animals that don’t blink. The staring is too loud, the air too heavy. It’s still not time.
She escapes to the garden—her quiet haven. Whenever the chatter of the same cartoons rolled on repeat would get too much for her, she’d slip out to the lush hideaway of the backyard. There are things she couldn’t grow then, things that would make him sicker, but now she grows them for him. He was barely an adult then gone. It stings to think about—all the sunny days he won’t get to see. But there’s a new grapefruit tree, short and strong, its white blossoms watching her wistfully. They’ll be morphing to beautiful orbs of gold soon and her smile turns bittersweet, another memory dripping from the glossy pollen.
“Why?! Why can’t I have it?!” she remembered him howling, sharp like the corners of the juice carton he gripped so tightly. It had collapsed in the middle and threatened to leak obnoxiously. It was his favorite, one of the few things that soothed him, but it had become dangerous. Grapefruit could stop his meds from being absorbed properly, spike something deadly. That tiny pleasure could unmake him. And there it was again: the quiet panic, the endless filtration of choices, of possible disasters, of things other people never had to think about. She was the kidney now, filtering the world so it wouldn’t poison him.
She knew he tried to understand but couldn’t. His mind stirred up to fervent boiling point by his whims, like trying to argue down a toddler. He couldn’t help the things he clung to. Then the grocery store heaped on the stimulation until he exploded. The constant murmuring of people, the staring, the way the fluorescent light’s brightness practically squealed overhead. Even she found it overwhelming. Life was unfair. She wanted to cry with him. This small, silly pleasure denied him. The crowd swelled around them, gawking and whispering and she wanted to follow his lead and shout at them too. They didn’t understand either. All they saw was a grown man screaming like a child. She couldn’t even hug him while his senses were rubbed raw. She saw only one way,
“It’s ok, shh, hey, we can get it, okay? You just gotta take it real easy drinking it, promise? And we’ll keep an eye out,” she extended her hand towards him and waited for her words to have their calming effect. His eyes darted like jilted pinballs, unable to settle on hers or anyone’s, but eventually his grip loosened on the carton and his hand took her offering.
They bought the juice, practically fleeing the store once the cashier finished ringing everything up. In the car, he was still fidgeting, stimming, fingers drumming along the cardboard. Her hands were locked around the steering wheel. He didn’t speak, but after a few minutes, he reached across the gearshift with an awkward, lopsided hug, quick, and a little too firm. She knew what it meant: an apology, and an I love you, stitched together the only way he knew how. She rested her hand on his forearm for the briefest moment and sighed.
He did drink it slowly. He was methodic and precise as always. They did keep an eye out. But even so, a week later, she was holding his hand in the emergency room, praying to the machines. After he made it through that scare, he finally accepted there would be no more juice.
In the end though, it didn’t matter. When his ashes finally came home, what was left of him after those last procedures, she scattered them under this tree. They’d said the procedures were a success, something to be proud of despite everything. A success, she tells herself, when the needling injustice of it gets too acute. And at least most of him is home now. She tenderly traces the veins of a gleaming, green leaf, and hopes a part of him made it through, absorbed and at peace. She imagines nature taking his dry, dusty remains, and growing him into the citrus fruit he once loved almost to death. She whispers her musings to the branches and pretends she hears him in the rustle. He would’ve liked to be a tree. Deep down, she knows it would have been easier for both of them.
~~~
Because it was always difficult, not just when he was sick. Admitting it was to accept total failure so she never did, but it was like the world wasn’t made for him to live in the way he was. Even as he started to get better, there was a friction that nagged them, ground them down as much as they tried to push through it. It was unfair and exhausting.
After the juice incident, he’d been doing better, not fully healed but definitely more full of energy. His appetite crept back in slow, uncertain steps, but at the same time, his personality swelled again to butt up against the world around him. In the clinic, he’d watch his cartoons on repeat, turning the sound up loud enough to drown out the nurses talking. He started asking when they would go to the beach again, then demanding, then running away to try and get there himself. She was glad to have him back to his old self even if that old self frayed her nerves like sand whipped at her shins by a sea wind. It was tough but she loved him. This was their life. They would persevere.
She’d gone to find him after another escape attempt days before their planned outing, but when he mentioned a strange pressure behind his eyes, something lurched inside her. It was probably just the new meds. No need to panic. They’d said side effects could come and go. She called the nurse line and they said bring him in, just in case.
It didn’t seem like an emergency. Not really. He was tired, but he usually was after walking so far. The hospital lights buzzed as they wheeled him through. She held his hand and told herself they were being overly cautious. She let herself believe it. By the time she came back from the bathroom, the monitors were alarming. She pressed the call button. The hallway flooded. Someone pulled her gently back. Somewhere behind the curtain, someone else said something about brain swelling. About time. About it running out.
She screamed. Punched the wall. Tore her hair. It was all ending so fast. It was her fault. He was dying because she didn’t pay enough attention, didn’t take him to the beach sooner, because she let him have juice, or didn’t let him have juice, because she couldn’t keep him locked up and safe in the house where no one could hurt him. It was all her fault because she couldn’t be the kind of mother who took care of a child like him.
When the nurses came to find her, a shaking, sobbing mess in the waiting room, they told her the doctors had done all they could. That his body was still trying, but he would likely never wake up. They said that if she wanted, they could keep him going a bit longer. Long enough to give someone else a better chance. They said they knew it was hard but there was a choice to make. She wouldn’t have to make it straight away. She could hold his hand and brush his hair and sit with him for as long as she needed. But eventually, she would have to decide.
~~~
Life lumbers on. She wafts in and out of the house, its rooms, there but not. The letters are still unopened. She dreams about them, their presence multiplying like cells, stacked like bones on the hospital bed her son passed away in as if they’d replaced him. Once she dreamed they grew roots that wrapped her in an earthy embrace. The day after the seventh letter, she cracks. It starts with tea spilled on the kitchen counter and as she reaches for a rag, her hand lands on an envelope—the first one, soft at the edges now, as if it’s waited long enough. A borrowed jolt of anticipation rises in her chest. Open it. Open it. He would always chant when new mail arrived. This time, a sign.
Dear Donor Family…
Her eyes move in a cadence, the words fall like heart beats.
I want to express my profound gratitude for your son’s selfless act … I received his liver and it changed my life, gave my family hope.
She breathes in the next one and the next. The choice that day at the hospital is laid bare. She couldn’t stop thinking she was dooming him with her decision, giving up, deciding too soon because it was easier than waiting, than continuing to fight when they were both so tired. But these people pass no judgement and their gratitude seeps into her guilt until it softens and melts.
… We can never tell you how much you mean to us … alive to see my first grandson … this precious gift … wouldn’t be here without your son’s sacrifice, without your impossible decision…
The thumping rises in her ears, a whooshing gurgle of love pumped back into her aching grief. A hug from beyond. One by one, they give him back, in precious, beautiful, alive pieces. Each letter pulses with a part of him that gets to keep going, despite the choice, because of the choice. The last one is in a child’s handwriting, slanted and hopeful.
I got your son’s kidney. He was so brave! My mum says now I can go swimming again. We live right next to the beach! She said to say thank you but I wanted to say it myself too.
And underneath is the mother’s careful script, the kind that holds hands and meets gazes without flinching:
We are sending you our love every single day.
All of my parts, she remembers. And she smiles, like it’s the perfect trick he would have pulled—clever and heartbreaking—his way of letting her know that she did the best she could.
Becks Simpson is a writer, illustrator, and musician from Australia, now based in Montreal where she has, contrary to popular opinion, made peace with the snow. Her work has appeared in Sky Island Journal and SQUID Lit. By day she does nerdy software things; by night she moonlights as the Antipode Artist, doing all the arty things.
Instagram: @antipode_artist
Author’s Note:
I never expected to write this story but when I found the letters my mother had received over the years while cleaning out her house after she passed, all that heartache from my brother’s death a decade ago flooded back. Now it is me who receives the letters and each one is a precious and tragic reminder that is both beautiful and devastating. I wanted to capture that in this piece so others can feel the human experience that goes beyond signing a few forms as well as show what it’s like to pour so much love into someone to eventually lose them anyway but how donation means they’re not really lost. An homage to my mother and brother and all the other donors and recipients out there.