Nazar is 12 years old and spent the last three battling leukemia and heart failure that barely allowed him to breathe. His only way out was a heart transplant, something that in Ukraine, given the situation, seems almost like a miracle.
That miracle came thanks to a mother who had just lost her daughter. Instead of shutting herself away in grief, she made a decision that would change a stranger’s life: she donated the girl’s heart.
Months later, at the First Territorial Medical Center in Lviv, she asked for something few would dare to ask for: to meet Nazar and hear her daughter’s heartbeat one more time.
It is hard to imagine that moment without feeling your chest tighten. “I will be grateful to you for the rest of my life”, she told him through tears. A heart that stopped beating for one mother continues beating for another life, and amid so much loss, that is proof that something can keep growing.
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