In Italy, a child’s death raises the number of organ donations to unprecedented national levels. In Chicago’s south suburbs, a bereaved mother from Oak Forest and a once-ailing man in Manteno form a friendship, and a Mokena widower reads a Pennsylvania teenager’s note thanking him for his mother’s restored health. On Chicago’s North Side, a father is grateful his children know their mother’s generosity lives on.
All are examples of what writer Reg Green calls “life coming bravely out of death” through organ donation, and of a growing connection between the families of organ donors and recipients.
According to Dave Bosch of the Regional Organ Bank of Illinois, meetings between donors’ families and recipients are taking place “relatively often,” though some transplant centers are reluctant to encourage meetings because of the emotional issues surrounding a transplant.
“But we’ve had some very successful meetings. I haven’t heard of any negative ones.”
Green, whose 7-year-old son, Nicholas, was shot during an attempted robbery on an Italian highway in 1994, recently wrote “The Nicholas Effect” (O’Reilly & Associates Inc. $24.95), a book that affirms the life-enhancing possibilities of organ donation.
Nicholas was on life support for two days before Green and his wife, Maggie, learned there was no hope of recovery. Although he vividly recalls the details of that day, Green has one blank spot.
“The one thing I don’t remember is which one of us suggested (donating Nicholas’ organs),” he said during a recent visit to Chicago from his home in Bodega Bay, Calif.
Whoever voiced it first, the decision was spontaneous and mutual. “(Nicholas) didn’t need that body anymore and so it became clear to us his future could be given to someone else,” Green explained. “Seven people are alive now because of Nicholas.”
But Nicholas’ life and death and his parents’ decision resonated beyond those seven cases. “It took Italy by storm,” he said. “The Nicholas Effect” is more than the title of a book; it’s what Italians called the resulting increase in organ donation after Nicholas was killed, Green added. That country’s low rate of organ donation more than doubled, meaning “literally thousands of people are alive today. That’s quite a legacy for a 7-year-old boy.”
The typical brain death produces three or four organs to donate, giving survivors “the choice of saving three or four other families from going through the devastation that you are going through,” Green said.
Linda Likosar of Oak Forest had given organ donation little thought until she renewed her driver’s license in 1995, three months before the death of her 18-year-old son, Dan Norkus, in a car accident.
“I used to just slough it off,” Likosar said, “but this time I figured, `Why not?’ We’re put on this earth to help each other.”
As she waited at the hospital after the accident, “four doctors came in at the same time, and I knew there was something wrong.” Agreeing to donate her son’s organs was “easier after I had made the decision for myself.”
“Dan’s organs helped six people extend their lives,” she said.
Likosar learned about the recipients in a letter from the Regional Organ Bank of Illinois, based in Chicago. A man in Indiana and a woman in Virginia are breathing easier with Dan’s lungs. One man has a new liver, another a new heart. The second kidney and the pancreas went to a middle-aged diabetic named Bernie Lulkowski, who lives in Manteno.
“When I read that letter, I really cried,” Likosar said.
According to Bosch, for about a year after the transplant, donors’ families and recipients can exchange letters without identifying themselves. If families want to meet after that time, ROBI will arrange for a meeting, Bosch said.
Knowing that other lives have been renewed is comforting, Likosar said, and she was delighted to receive a phone call from Lulkowski. “Now he’s a good friend of mine,” she said. “Eventually, I would like to meet them all.”
“I owe Linda my whole life,” said Lulkowski, who had waited a year and a half on a transplant list. “I can just imagine what she went through when she lost her son. I don’t know if I could have done that if I lost my kid.”
When they made out their wills four years ago, John Lulewicz of Mokena and his wife, Barb, humorously agreed that “we would donate our organs if there was anything worth taking.” So when Barb Lulewicz suffered a fatal aneurysm in 1997 at age 55, the decision to donate had already been made. “You can’t take it with you,” John Lulewicz said. “You might as well do some good down here.”
Six weeks later, he learned his wife’s liver had been transplanted into a Pennsylvania woman, and her kidneys had gone to two men, 65 and 21. He realized the impact of the donation when he got a letter from the Pennsylvania woman’s 14-year-old son, which read, “Thank you for giving me my mother back.”
Lulewicz pondered for a while, then decided to write back. After exchanging letters for a year, Lulewicz and the boy’s mother met this spring when she came to Chicago for a checkup. He learned the woman, a Chicago native, had grown up in the same West Pullman neighborhood as his late wife and had chosen the same profession, nursing.
“We’ve been e-mailing back and forth,” Lulewicz said. “I know some good came out of this.”
Healthy and athletic, 35-year-old Jan Ehrenberg might not have been expected to think about organ donation, but she did. “She was adamant about (organ donation),” said her husband, Vince Ehrenberg. “She just mentioned it six months ago. She had it on her driver’s license. I thought it was very strange.”
But helping others was the way Jan Ehrenberg had always lived her life. “That’s the type of person that she was. She always gave to everyone,” Vince Ehrenberg recalled.
An English teacher at Addison Trail High School and mother of two young girls, Ehrenberg died in the spring as a result of head injuries suffered in a basketball game. Ehrenberg’s organs helped a 13-month-old baby, a woman suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, a diabetic man and a man in kidney failure.
“I would never second-guess the donation,” said Ehrenberg, who wants his daughters, Taylor, 7, and Elise, 3, to meet the transplant recipients. “I thought it would be important for the girls to see that their mom helped somebody, to see how happy the other people are.”
As of Aug. 1, almost 4,000 people in the ROBI coverage area of Illinois and Northwest Indiana and more than 66,000 people across the nation are awaiting organ transplants, Bosch said.
ROBI officials and families who have opted for organ donation would like to see more people take Green’s message to heart. “Human hearts are interchangeable,” Green said.
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For more information, call the Regional Organ Bank of Illinois at 312-431-3600.
