Heroes Honored on Donate Life Float
- Guest post by Reg Green, donor father
When Roxanna Green, the mother of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl who was killed in the Gabby Giffords shooting rampage, takes her honored place in the Rose Parade on Jan. 2, she will be among a group of people who feel more keenly than anyone else the special blend of anguish and inspiration that her family bequeathed.
There was no shortage of anguish. She remembers, as in a nightmare, her daughter covered with a sheet and she, beside her, kissing her face and stroking her feet, willing her to live.
A rendering of the 2012 Donate Life Rose Parade Float, "...One More Day."
But, even as she and her husband, John, grappled with the enormity of their loss, they found the strength to make a decision to donate her corneas, restoring the sight of two people for whom there was no other cure. The child, though born on one day of indiscriminate killing, Sept. 11, 2001 and dying on another, gave the nation a reason to believe that selflessness can overcome senselessness.
Yet the loss was profound. Christina-Taylor balanced good works with good grades and was the only girl on her Little League team, perhaps not surprisingly, as her father is a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
In the parade Roxanna will be on the Donate Life float with people – and portraits of people — whose lives, though superficially very different, have much in common with hers. One of those portraits, called floragraphs because they are made entirely of natural materials, is of 21-year-old Jeremy Doyle of Chillicothe, whose motorcycle was knocked over by a car that ran a red light on the day he was going to propose to his girl friend. Just before the accident, Jeremy had made separate visits to his mother, stepfather and sister to tell them the news.
Jeremy Doyle's floragraph
“I’ll always treasure the hug we shared that day,” says his mother, Kelley. The family’s decision to donate saved four lives and restored the sight of two others.
The float riders’ stories are all similar mixtures of heart-wrench and inspiration. Mary Ellen Decker of Windsor, NY, who, when her 21-year-old son Seth committed suicide on a beautiful September afternoon in 2005, had the fortitude to donate his organs; Janice Langbehn, Olympia, Washington, whose 39-year-old life partner, Lisa Marie Pond, died of an aneurysm but who was not allowed to see her in her final hours because of their non-married status, leading to a directive from President Obama permitting gay and lesbian family members access to their hospitalized partners; and Arnold Perez, a 46-year-old screenprinter from Guatemala, living in Los Angeles, who says he had never heard of transplantation until he and his wife, Eva, were asked if they would donate the organs of their 6-year-old son, Hernán, who crashed into a tree when, excited by snow on the nearby mountains, he impatiently jumped on his sled before they could stop him. When they received a letter telling them about the recipients, they both cried, Arnold remembers. “We still keep it,” he adds.
The Green family will find another kind of kinship with the recipients on the float, seeing living proof of the good they themselves did.
One of them, Kara Thio, of Cary, North Carolina, was born without a bile duct and, agonizingly, her parents learned she would need to grow to 15 lbs. before the local hospital could operate, a weight she could never reach. But instead of giving up, they kept searching until the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco undertook to try and, after a 15-hour operation, transplanted a liver into the 8-month-old, 11 lb. baby. Now that baby is 19.
The float riders’ stories are all similar mixtures of heart-wrench and inspiration.
Another, Emily Fennell, received one of the first hand transplants in the United States earlier this year and, after a few months, is so used to it that she can scarcely remember when she had a hook where her right hand used to be.
The rapidly-developing techniques can surprise even those who know this field well. When Max Zapata donated a kidney to a stranger, her brother gave one of his to someone else, whose wife gave one of hers, continuing a chain until 10 people, from California to New York, became free of the dialysis machines that until then had ruled their life.
With the roller-coaster events that every one of these riders has faced, all of them will have mixed emotions as they pass by the cheering crowds. In her case, Roxanna says, “I cannot forget that she was as sure as the rest of the family that organ donation was the right thing to do when my mother died of an aneurysm two years ago.”
Perhaps she will also think of the mother who brought her small son to see her two days after the shooting to say that, made fun of by the other kids, he sat alone at the back of the school bus for two weeks until a new pal came to sit with him: Christina-Taylor Green.
Reg Green (www.nicholasgreen.org) is the father of Nicholas Green, a 7-year-old boy who was shot during a family vacation in Italy and whose organs were donated to seven Italians.
To read more about those who will be honored in the Donate Life Rose Parade ® float, click here. And make sure to tune in to the 123rd Rose Parade® on Jan. 2, 2012 at 11 a.m. EST. The “…One More Day” float will be the 41st in line.
One Comment »
Kelley Deavers
It will be such an honor to meet Roxanna Green, Mary-Ellen Decker, Janice and Arnold and all of the other donor families who share our special bond of donation; and I particularly want to meet some of the donor recipients and their families to see how they are dealing with their transplants and donations.
I am hoping that this will further inspire me to make contact with our son, Jeremy Doyle’s, donor recipients mentioned above.