May 10, 2009


All the love a little suitcase can hold — and then some

Cindy Corell
Connections

Neelye Moffett Kochanowicz thinks hers is an unremarkable life. She is taking time off from work to raise her young children, she has a great husband she thinks she doesn't appreciate enough, she is close to her family and she sees God's hand in her life.

She wondered why I wanted to feature her on the front page of The News Leader on Mother's Day.

I didn't know Neelye until I called for the interview. I had seen her in church, knew she and her husband, Rob, had adopted two babies who were close in age and I knew she'd had health problems. Motherhood obviously wasn't something that had come easily, and I wondered why she fought so hard for it.

I had a lot to learn. Most of it is in the story on today's front page. A lot of it isn't. Like the lessons I learned from Neelye and Rob's extraordinary empathy for others.

Katie and Jacob were adopted through the foster child program run by Social Services. These are stories that usually have horrible beginnings and wonderful endings. But there is a lot of pain along the way for all involved.

When Neelye got the phone call that they would be taking home an infant, she and Rob prepared their home, prepared their hearts and prepared for disappointment.

"The first thing I bought for her was a little suitcase," Neelye said. "If she was going to go home, I wanted her to have something to carry things in, all the things we would get for her, something to remember us by."

I wrote the words in my notebook. Of all the words I've heard in an interview, those were about the most profound.

All her life, through two heart transplants, two long bouts with chemotherapy, brain surgery and the fierce struggle to have children of her own, Neelye knows one of the greatest lessons of the world. She accepts that she might face disappointment, then holds on with all she has to the beautiful blessings in her life.

I don't have to know the family well to know where Neelye learned that. She was the baby of three children, and at 3, doctors said the pain in her left arm was from bone cancer. Radiation, chemotherapy, subsequent heart disease, then her first heart transplant at age 12.

Was she a sickly child? Oh no, with her new heart she ran and played and skied and rode horses. She was a cheerleader, but she cracks up when she tells you that.

"I am not the cheerleader type," she said.

Then high school and college and a nursing degree and the jealousy when her sister became pregnant and had her first child.

Then meeting the love of her life and seeing that love tested and victorious with two weddings, including one in a waiting room before her brain surgery.

Then the foster care program and waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Then the long-awaited phone calls: One baby. Another baby. And yes! The adoption papers are signed. The babies belong to the Kochano- wiczes as if they had conceived them!

Then the horrible disease that comes when a transplanted heart begins to wear out.

"Thank goodness for my good friends who would go to the park with us because I couldn't chase my own children," she said.

Then the call early one May morning last year that her second heart had been donated, waking the babies to kiss them goodbye and what she describes as the hardest part of her life so far: Not seeing her babies for a whole week.

Life is good for Neelye, Rob, Katie and Jacob right now. Those good times don't always last, she knows, so she relishes every runny nose, every hand-drawn picture, every bump on the head, every hug, every kiss, every toddler fight.

That's motherhood, disappointment and all.

She gives so much that we all can learn from her unremarkable life. Like how when faced with the possibility of having a child of her own to hold, she bought a little suitcase because it might not work out.

And if it didn't work out, she wanted the child's life to be better for having held her for a while.

If being a mother means putting your children first, Neelye could write the book on it.

I think she should.

Neelye Moffett Kochanowicz's life might be unremarkable.

But she's not.

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