Leo Gillick
Some gifts are better than others, but the gift of life is the best of all. A group of people who all had their lives saved by a single organ donor have come together to celebrate her essential gift.
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Organ donation is a quick and easy thing to sign up for. Some people shy away from it due to religious or squeamish reasons. But the process saves a lot of lives. Take this story, for example.
Top Quality Meats: When Adelyn Miller died, she left behind a whole selection of high-quality organs that could be passed on to needy people. As a result, she ended up saving five people’s lives. She died at only 20 years old after a traffic accident. Her family misses her deeply, but her tragedy was to others’ benefit.
- Dennis Golownia: Lungs
- Kevin Enders: Liver
- Jack Feast: Heart
- Suzie Dauer: Kidney
The mother of the organ donor reached out to the recipients, and four of the five replied. She wanted to know who her daughter had helped live on.
Acceptance
To help with her stages of grief, the mother of Adelyn spoke to four of the five people saved by her daughter’s organ donation. Meeting the men and women who will live fuller lives after the death of a child helped her come to terms with the tragedy.
- “Being able to meet her recipients has been extremely healing to me,” she explained. “She really impacted a lot of people.”
The group stays in contact, and they meet up to commemorate the gifts they received from the young woman’s body.
Signing up for organ donation is simple and could easily help save someone’s life. For some, the idea is still a rather uncomfortable one. But the waiting lists for organs are enormous, and even the smallest donations are highly necessary.
- However, there have been leaps and bounds in the technology surrounding organ replacements. Recently, we have seen remarkable animal-to-human transplants. In some cases, organs have been replaced with mechanical ones and have been successfully integrated without rejection.
