It Ain't Over (42 page)

Starting with five women, Hot Bread Kitchen initially made loaves of bread that were sold in a local farmer’s market. Since then, 22 women from 11 countries have come through the on-the-job training program, including two
who have moved into managerial positions at Hot Bread Kitchen and two who have taken jobs at Daniel’s bakery.

“We have become a United Nations of bread,” says Jessamyn. The workers produce more than a thousand loaves of multiethnic breads a day, inspired by the countries the women come from, which are then sold at dozens of outlets in the metropolitan New York area, including Whole Foods. “We have women from Bangladesh, Nepal, Mali, Haiti, Mexico, and Morocco, and we make stone-ground corn tortillas, an Armenian-style
lavash,
and a Moroccan flatbread called
msmen.
” The kitchen also runs English and computer classes for the women.

In 2011, the kitchen expanded its mission, launching HBK Incubates, a program that supports graduates who wish to start their own food businesses and share their knowledge with others in the community. “We rent them space, and later, help them get the licenses they need, learn packaging and marketing, and get started.” There are 39 businesses enrolled in HBK Incubates, including a caterer, a cake pop maker, a pickler, an ice-cream maker, a couple who make Dominican-style cakes, and a housewife who makes “sexy novelty bakery items.”

As for Jessamyn, Hot Bread Kitchen offers the intellectual stimulation of running a business, the fulfillment of helping others, and the practical happiness of putting on an apron and sticking her hands in some dough.

“Food is the vehicle for sharing and culture, and that’s very important to me,” she says. “I don’t think I’d be where I am today, professionally and personally, without my mother and grandmother—those two strong women—and all of those conversations that happened in the kitchen.”

And sometimes it helps if you hear something wrong.

Roxanne Watson, 59

Nanuet, New York

M
y only chance to live is if someone else dies.

The thought tortured Roxanne Watson. She tried to push it out of her mind. But in 2010, Roxanne was out of options. She was 56 and needed a new heart.

The transplant team at New York City’s Montefiore Medical Center was waiting for a perfect one—strong and healthy—to give her as many good years as possible. That meant it would have to be harvested, still beating, from the chest of a young person whose brain had stopped working. Whatever the cause—a car accident, a gunshot wound—for that person’s family, it would be a tragic ending. For Roxanne and her family, it would be a hopeful future.

“That was the hardest part,” Roxanne says. “You would never want to be in that position, sitting there in the hospital just waiting for someone to die.”

That someone, it turns out, would be a 180-pound, 23-year-old male. Those were the only details doctors were allowed to share with Roxanne
about her donor, but they made an immediate connection. A single mother, Roxanne had only one child, a son about the same size as her donor, and only a few years older. “That could have been
my
son,” she thought. “What horrific pain was his mother going through? I couldn’t even imagine.”

Roxanne had been through eight years of deteriorating health that had landed her in the hospital 17 times, leaving her unable to work. “I didn’t want anybody else to suffer the way I had,” she explains. So when doctors released her from the hospital nine days after her transplant surgery, she had a new heart and a new purpose in life: To tell her story to as many people as possible so they’d sign up to be organ donors and possibly do for someone what this young man had done for her. “That was my mission,” she says.

Born and raised in the Bronx, Roxanne had always had a nose-to-the-grindstone attitude that took her from part-time salesclerk at her neighborhood Sears in her early twenties to stints at Sam’s Club, Old Navy, and Victoria’s Secret. She learned how to open stores, hire employees, and display merchandise, eventually becoming a district manager for KB Toys, responsible for 15 stores and $30 million in annual sales. “I worked like an animal, but I really enjoyed it,” she recalls.

In 2003, she took on her biggest challenge yet: Managing a discount designer-goods store called AJWright. “It was in a tough neighborhood and was the dirtiest, nastiest store in the company. Customers were stealing merchandise. Employees were robbing the store. It was out of control.”

But in less than a year, she’d turned things around. “I didn’t have to fire anyone, but I said, ‘Either start working or go away.’ When people saw that the store could be successful, they wanted to be a part of that success. They were excited to work.” And no one was more dedicated than Roxanne, who put in long hours six days a week for three years.

But the job took its toll: One day, she was out on the floor when she felt like she couldn’t
breathe and started sweating so badly that her coworkers sat her down in her office, pointing a fan at her face and placing cold towels on her forehead. “I felt like I was going to pass out. I needed air. I was very weak. It was a horrible feeling.”

Roxanne had had a heart attack. It was one of many cardiac episodes she’d experience. Even after doctors implanted a pacemaker, she’d find herself slumped at her desk with the same awful symptoms. So she took a four-month leave to try to get back to her old self. But after returning to work on a Monday, she was in the hospital again by Thursday.

“That was it. The doctors told me I couldn’t work anymore.”

For someone whose drive had taken her from a $70-a-week job to one earning more than $100,000 a year, a forced retirement at age 52 was unbearable. “I was just devastated. I never thought I would not be able to work, especially at a job I loved. I was more upset about that than being sick because I didn’t realize how sick I was.”

But Roxanne was
very
sick. In fact, her heart was failing, and the next few years were a downward spiral. Not only did she deplete her savings to pay for medical tests and procedures while waiting for Social Security to kick in, but her five-foot, four-inch frame wasted away from 145 pounds to 93. “I was wearing kids’ clothes,” she says. “I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror.”

Roxanne’s son quit his job coaching football at Rutgers University to move home to care for her, buying her a Great Dane to keep her spirits up. Many nights, feeling too weak to climb into bed, she’d curl up with the dog on the floor. “I had no strength,” she says. In April 2010, her physicians declared an emergency. “We have to get you a heart,” they said.

The two-week hospital stay the doctors predicted turned into a month, then two months, then nearly three. “I was the longest in-patient stay in history at that hospital waiting for a heart,” she says. “It was 78 days.” Three times
doctors thought they had the right heart, but each one was ultimately rejected for being the wrong size or not healthy enough. “That’s a roller coaster you don’t want to ride. Everybody would come to the hospital to say ‘I love you’ in case I didn’t make it through surgery, but then there would be no surgery. It was horrible and I went through it three times.”

While she waited, Roxanne, who is black, learned that transplants don’t have to take place between people of the same race. So the more people of
every
ethnicity willing to donate organs, the more help for people like her. She also learned that minorities were less likely to sign up to be organ donors. And so, broadening the donor base became a part of her mission.

“Are you an organ donor?” she’d press family and friends who came to visit. Often they’d say they’d never thought about it before, so Roxanne would persuade them to sign up. “It wasn’t that they didn’t want to. That’s when I decided maybe all we really need to do is ask people.”

If doctors could find her a heart and she made it out of the hospital alive, she decided, she was going to help others have the same chance.

Finally, on July 15, 2010, just before midnight, she got a call from the transplant coordinator saying, “It’s a go.”

“It was such a huge relief to me that I wasn’t even afraid. But I had always felt that I was going to live.”

When doctors opened Roxanne up, her enlarged heart was nearly as big as a football. The new one fit perfectly in her chest, and by the next day, she was sitting up in her hospital bed. Within a week of leaving the hospital, and true to her vow, she had her first speaking assignment: Still wearing a surgical mask to protect her from germs, she was back at the hospital for a Minority Donor Awareness Week, talking about her ordeal.

Although she’d been through major heart surgery, Roxanne was tireless in her new mission. She talked to doctors, nurses, clinicians, and donor organizations; she’d
go to health fairs, colleges, and hospitals—wherever she thought she’d find a receptive audience. And if an organization assigned her a table at an event, she’d stand in front of it and corral passersby.

“Are you an organ donor?” she’d ask them, and once she had their attention, she’d tell them her story, answer their questions, and hand them an application. “I love signing people up one-on-one,” she says. “They feel more comfortable asking personal questions that may have stopped them from donating before. And whether they sign up or not, most people say, ‘Thank you for doing this.’ ”

And then something very strange happened: Roxanne suddenly had an inexplicable urge to fix up her house. “Out of the blue, I was suddenly attracted to Home Depot and Lowe’s. Every time I’d go past one, I wanted to shop. I had a compulsion to do all this crazy stuff I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in doing before my transplant, like ripping out all the carpets, repainting the walls, and turning my dining room and garage into home theaters. I thought, wait a minute—could this person, whose heart I have, have been a construction worker? No, that’s ridiculous.”

But sure enough, while watching a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network one day, in which experts answered viewers’ questions, Roxanne wrote to the producers explaining her drive to sign up organ donors, especially minorities, and then she asked a question: “Is it possible to take on the personality of your organ donor?”

Before she knew it, Roxanne was invited on the show, called
Ask Oprah’s All-Stars,
and in June 2011, not quite one year after her surgery, she was sitting with her son in a TV studio in Manhattan when in walked her organ donor’s family—the father, mother, and three sisters—a surprise arranged by the show’s producers.

“We all just started hugging and crying,” Roxanne says. One of the sisters said, “My God, you are so beautiful.” Another said, “Now we have another sister.”

The donor’s father beamed as he talked of his only son. “His name was Michael, and they were as thick as thieves,” Roxanne says.

He had been a volunteer firefighter who was training to be a helicopter mechanic in the Coast Guard—and, yes, he was a skilled carpenter who had worked alongside his dad to build their family’s New Jersey home. “I just knew it!” exclaimed Roxanne.

The more Roxanne learned about Michael, the more she realized how giant his heart was. “Everything he did in his life was service,” Roxanne says, “and at the end of his life, he was still serving people. One section of his liver was given to a 5-year-old Hispanic girl, another section to a 69-year-old Chinese man. A 42-year-old Jewish man received both of his lungs, and an 18-year-old black man his kidneys.

“And I got his heart,” Roxanne says. “Because of his gifts, there are five of us walking around in the world.”

Today, Roxanne continues to share Michael’s story with thousands of people, whether she’s lobbying state lawmakers to pass organ donor legislation or working with Dr. Oz to create a public service announcement that plays at DMV offices.

Most weeks, she’s still in the trenches, passing out organ donor applications. But no matter where she is, she always displays an eight-by-ten photo of a clean-shaven, baby-faced Michael, decked out in his military uniform.

“Wherever I go, whatever I do, I always have his picture. I don’t go anywhere without him. I have his heart.”

Marguerite Heard Thomas, 62

Bainbridge Island, Washington

Q
uick quiz: Marguerite Thomas is (a) adventurous, (b) energetic, (c) adaptable, (d) curious, or (e) all of the above.

If you answered
e,
then you probably have a good notion why, at age 50, Marguerite was brave enough to leave a successful 20-year career as an architect to try her hand at something new.

Marguerite had never liked staying put. As an army brat, she’d attended “12 schools in 12 years, all over the world,” but unlike so many military kids who crave stability, “I loved every part of it—the new experiences, the new challenges.” In college, she traveled to South and Central America to work with indigenous populations, and that sense of adventure stayed with her. “Whenever I get an offer to do something new, my response is always: ‘My bags are packed! I’m ready to go!’ ”