Bone Marrow Awareness Day: a day of standing still and answering questions

Ten of the forty-five days on this route are Bone Marrow Awareness Days, and Day 9 is one of them. In the founder's own words: "I stay where I am to educate about donors, transplants, how and why they should join." She spends the day on public ground in downtown Mount Vernon, by the river. The city built its waterfront to be stood around in — a twenty-four-foot-wide pedestrian riverwalk and a 30,000-square-foot park between Gates Street, First Street, Myrtle Street and the Skagit River, with the Tulip Dance sculpture by Jennifer Corio and Dave Frei.

Most of what she has to tell you is simpler than people expect. Joining the NMDP registry in the United States means answering a few questions to confirm you can join and swabbing the inside of your cheek; the free kit usually arrives by mail in three to seven days and goes back in a prepaid envelope for tissue typing. You can join between the ages of 18 and 35, and you stay listed until you are 61 unless you ask to be removed. If you are ever matched, about 90 percent of donations are peripheral blood stem cells collected from circulating blood and about 10 percent are marrow withdrawn from the hip bone under anesthesia. The doctor chooses the method that is best for the success and health of their patient.

The Jada Bascom Foundation does not run a registry. It does not mail kits, type tissue, collect cells, or decide who is eligible — the registries do all of that, and they are the ones you sign up with. What the foundation does is explain the thing plainly and point people to the registry that will take them. Nothing gets signed on the pavement here. The questions people actually ask are about pain, about time off work, and about whether they are too old or too unwell to be any use, and on that last one the honest answer is that the registry decides, not her.

Anyone who wants to ask her something can find her there. She is walking because her granddaughter needed marrow from a stranger before she was a year old, and because the stranger existed: a man in Germany whose name was already on a registry when the search began. WMDA's Search and Match Service manages an inventory of more than 42 million donors available for transplantation. He was one of them, and the match existed because he had already joined.