max s. gerber(the latest shot)

twenty years ago anissa ayala was a 16 year old girl who had just found that she had developed a very aggressive form of leukemia. at the time the national donor registry had very few names and with no matches on the donor list, and no matches in the family, the ayalas made an unusual decision. mary and abe decided to have another child, hoping that that child would somehow be a match for anissa. it was a longshot, to be sure, the odds of a match were less than 25%.

in 1990 marissa ayala was born and was a perfect donor. the bone marrow transplant was a success and anissa remains cancer free to this day. now 19, marissa lives with her parents while going to school and anissa, now 37, works for the leukemia and lymphoma society.

when marissa was born the ayala’s decision to have a new child to save their daughter was met with outrage as much as anything else. there were threats made, and accusations of farming babies for spare parts. still, the family’s love for marissa is clear, and clearly not just related to saving anissa’s life.

many people spend a great deal of time struggling with indecision, wishing that their lives somehow had a predetermined direction or some built-in meaning. we try to find this through our work, through our friends, through love and desire, through religion. imagine if you were marissa ayala, and you actually were born for a very specific reason. would that make life easier or harder? what if you knew that the thing you were born to do had already been done, that it had, in fact, been done before you could even remember. would that change things? would you struggle with indirection and indecision like the rest of us who only hope that we have a purpose? we go through our lives manufacturing our own reasons for living, for getting up in the morning, for getting out of bed, for going to work and getting things done. then every once in a while there are people for whom the reasons truly are built-in to who and why they are.

my thanks to florence nash at people magazine for the assignment, and of course, to cpl. bennett for his gracious assistance.

here’s the photo they used, as it appeared in the magazine.