One memory, among those that have crowded into our lives in the last two years, is particularly vivid today. We were in Paris for a television program with the recipients of Nicholas' organs. Just the immediate families were there, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, but together we half-filled the bus that took us to the studio. I looked around at the excited young faces taking in the sights and I asked myself: Did one little body do all this? And the answer is yes, it did. It changed the lives of everyone on that bus beyond recognition.
And not only theirs, but grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends, neighbors and teachers too. All were saved the desolation Maggie and I have felt since Nicholas died. As I heard them chatting eagerly among themselves, I realized again that if we had made a different decision in Messina, nursed our grief, and shrugged off their troubles as none of our affair, I don't think we could have looked back without a deep sense of shame.
Two years ago these people were just statistics to us. But, having met them and knowing the agony they went through, I wonder now how any other decision would have been possible.
This gift is in the hands of the family of every potential donor. Those whose fate you hold can suffer the same devastating blow that you have just suffered or they can be reborn. You may never again have the chance to make such a difference to the world.
I sense that public opinion around the world is ready for a change so that donations will no longer seem a little horrifying or something we prefer to leave to others but quite simply as the natural thing to do. Our decision was identical to what all the donor families in this room and arotmel the world have done. Their loss is indistinguishable from ours and I daresay, few of us can ever be really happy again. But at every meeting Maggie and I go to someone will come up and say: I wish I'd done that. They feel they have lost everything and got nothing back and they sense that, although we lost everything too, we did get something back. They are right: for the rest of our lives those of us who donated can remember, with pride, that even in the act of dying our loved ones helped others when no one else could.
Reg Green
Genoa, November 23, 1996
Return to "The Nicholas Effect"