THE BIKER WITH A BIG HEART
IT TOOK SEVERAL drafts to get the letters right. To distill her boy’s life into the two dimensionality of words on paper. To paint a picture of someone full of energy and love, so that the beneficiaries of his death, the recipients of his organs, would know just how lucky they were.
Three weeks earlier, the thread that held Christine Cheers’ world together had been ripped away. On February 21, 2018, someone on the other end of the phone had said the words that bring parents to their knees: “There’s been an accident.”
Her son, James Mazzuchelli, 32, a flight surgeon with the United States Navy, had been injured in a helicopter training mission at a military base in California. If she wanted to see him while he was still alive, she needed to get on the next flight from Florida.
James was still breathing when Christine and James’s stepfather, David Cheers, arrived at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California, the next morning. Machines were keeping him alive, and the doctors told Christine that what she was seeing was likely his future—that her scuba-diving, worldtravelling, overachiever of a son was never going to wake up. He would never breathe on his own. He would never smile at her again.
It was time for Christine to honour the spirit
