SECOND CHANCES

One man’s incredible cross-country trek to meet the family who gave him a new heart

- A.C. Shilton FROM BICYCLING MAGAZINE

ON FEBRUARY 21, 2018, the thread that held Christine Cheers’s world together ripped clean away. That’s when she answered her phone and heard the words that bring parents to their knees: “There’s been an accident.” Her son, 32-year-old navy flight surgeon James Mazzuchelli, had been injured in a helicopter training mission at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton. If she wanted to see him while he was still alive, she needed to get on the next flight from Jacksonville, Florida—and she needed to pray.

James was still breathing when Christine and his 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, world-traveling, 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 of a man who had switched his major from commerce engineering to pre-med because he wanted to help people. It was time to make her very worst day some stranger’s best one.

Christine instructed the hospital to begin the organ donation process. These few words, as hard as they were to say, would soon ripple outward, allowing a man to return to work, a veteran to get his health back, and an ailing cyclist to get back on his bike.