Creating Your Legacy By Organ Donation

Creating Your Legacy By Organ Donation

Did you know that National Donor Sabbath occurs each November?

In 2011, friends of ours took their teen-age daughter, Emma, in for blood tests, believing she had mononucleosis.  That started what they later referred to as 72 hours of horror, as Emma went into cardiac arrest and suddenly had to be put on life-support.  Emma was somehow battling end-stage heart failure brought about by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Her heart had enlarged to the size of a volleyball, and she was placed on a transplant list. In an unbelievable miracle, a matching donor heart was found within hours and Emma received that transplant, thus saving her life.

Today, Emma is a vibrant, beautiful and healthy young woman. You can read about her here.  In gratitude for the life of their daughter, Nancie and Mark Rothman created Hearts for Emma, a non-profit corporation to help families who go through the same experience by raising money to assist with meals, travel costs and other non-covered expenses.

Another colleague of ours had a beautiful young daughter, Aliyah, who during her childhood years, underwent three different heart transplants.  Today, Aliyah attends Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, NC, majoring in Hospitality Administration.  She remains in good health. Her family has chosen to continue to raise money for HelpHopeLive, the leader in fundraising assistance and support for transplant and catastrophic injury.

The lives of these young women, and countless others, would never have been saved without the generosity of people that they will never meet, but who had signed their cards to donate their organs upon their death; and through the work of non-profit, federally designated organ procurement organizations, such as the NJ Sharing Network.

Each year in November, congregations and clergy unite during National Donor Sabbath to increase awareness of the critical need for organ and tissue donation.  All major religions support donation and view it as the greatest gift a person can give.  And who doesn’t want to save a life when they watch this video?

We are grateful for the work of the NJ Sharing Network, and other organizations like it, not only for the work they do for the general public, but because they saved the lives of people near and dear to us.

My Life’s Message is yet another way that you can record your willingness to give the greatest gift.  We have recorded our wishes.  Have you?