Event honors organ donors.
They walked one-by-one to place paper roses inside a shadow box. Some wiped away tears. Others stared straight ahead, almost in a daze. One child accompanying his mother grasped her hand tightly as he watched the changing images of faces projected high on the hospital wall.
Clint Moeckli: Died after ATV accident
Each family at the ceremony yesterday in University Hospital had a story to tell, and many stories began with a sudden, gut-wrenching tragedy that turned into a priceless gift for a total stranger.
Ann Moeckli of Jefferson City wore a pin bearing a photo of her son Clint cradling the antlers of a big buck he shot in 2005. Tall at 6 feet 4 inches, with blue eyes and a love of the outdoors, she called Clint a “kind of a rebel.”
On Aug. 5, 2006, he was riding a four-wheeler when he lost control and flipped off backward, hitting his head on pavement. For three days, he lay unconscious as parents Ann and Dan Moeckli waited anxiously. On the third day, doctors pronounced him brain-dead. A transplant coordinator approached the grieving family to broach the delicate subject of organ donation. Luckily, Ann Moeckli said, Clint had made the decision an easy one.
“After he got his driver’s license at 16, he said, ‘Mom, I signed up to be an organ donor,’ ” she recalled. “But other than that, we didn’t really discuss it. And I had actually forgotten about it until” the coordinator “came up and told us. And it was just, like, ‘Wow, I guess he did.’ It made it a lot easier knowing that’s what he wanted.”
Both of Clint’s kidneys, his heart, pancreas, liver and one of his eyes were transplanted to patients across the country. His mother has exchanged letters with some of the recipients. She has never heard from others. However, all the recipients remain in her prayers.
“I wish they would contact me more. I guess that’s what I would bring across as a message is for the recipient families to contact the donors as much as possible,” Ann Moeckli said. “Because it really helps. It helps us know that a piece of him is still living.”
The ceremony yesterday was a celebration of that unique bond.
In observance of Donate Life Month, dozens of families of donors and organ recipients met and shared stories near the main hospital entrance. In part of a tradition, the 80 families of University Hospital donors in 2008 were each given roses. These donors were featured in January on the Donate Life float in the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif. More than 120 University Hospital donors from 2009 will be commemorated at next year’s parade.
But officials said the demand for donors still greatly outpaces supply. Nationwide, 106,000 people are on waiting lists for a transplant they need to save their lives; 19 people die each day waiting for a transplant. A single donor can save the lives of as many as eight people and enhance the lives of 50 others through transplants of skin tissue and bone marrow.
Lisa Britt, a veterinarian and clinical assistant professor at the University of Missouri, said her story exemplifies this need. Cradling her four-year-old daughter, she told the crowd that in 1991, when she was a student, she suddenly began having trouble walking upstairs. She was soon diagnosed with a critical heart problem that gave her months to live. After waiting five months, she received a transplant from a 17-year-old girl, Jennifer Davis, who had died in a car accident.
Britt went on to achieve many of her personal and professional dreams, even defying clinical odds to give birth to two healthy children. Britt said she has never forgotten the gift, even inviting the parents of the donor to her wedding and naming her daughter “Jennifer” after the donor.
“Her gift allowed me to become a mother myself, and words cannot express my gratitude,” Britt said in a prepared statement.
Stories such as Britt’s can help people trying to make sense of a tragedy.
Miranda Binney of Sedalia said she had to make the decision about organ donation in 2007 for her brother, Eric James Binney, 19, who was killed in one-vehicle accident. She was comforted after hearing that his two corneas helped give sight to a woman in Georgia and a teenager in Ohio. But meeting others at the Donate Life ceremony, she became more certain than ever that she had made the right choice.
“It meant a lot,” she said. “Listening to the stories about donating tissues and organs, it makes me feel better about the decision we made. Being here, you just realize that he gets to live on.”
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