Today, the two embraced during an emotional testimonial before Rosa’s congregation at the Love of Jesus Family Church in Newark’s Vailsburg neighborhood. They urged the parishioners to become organ donors and to be in touch with the New Jersey Sharing Network.Rosa’s 17-year-old daughter, Ines Jahira Perez, was killed when her moped crashed on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark on Aug. 1, 2009. Sisk wound up getting her kidney and pancreas in a transplant two days later.
"It does save lives and I’m the proof of it," Sisk said.
The event also featured the unveiling of a floral portrait, or "floragraph" of Ines Jahira Perez, that will be among 60 portraits of organ donors displayed on the Donate Life float during the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., Jan. 1.
The friendship between the two began while Sisk was recuperating in the hospital and wrote Rosa a letter telling her how grateful he was.
"The thought of who donated the organs was always on my mind," he said. "They told me it was a young girl who had a tragic accident. I was thinking about the mother. I needed to get in touch with them to let them know I was doing all right."
Although organ donors’ identities are supposed to remain anonymous, they can be revealed if both parties agree.
The Sharing Network forwarded Sisk’s letter to Rosa, and "from the beginning, I could tell I wanted to meet him," she said.
Sisk and Rosa sent each other cards and letters for nearly a year before meeting at the network’s annual picnic in July.
That went so well that last month, Rosa and her children went to Sisk’s home for Thanksgiving dinner.
Sisk, 46, a onetime minor league catcher in the Montreal Expos’ farm system, had been a firefighter in Bayonne for 20 years before he was overwhelmed by kidney failure.
He had to leave the fire department and was undergoing dialysis three times a week, four times a day. As someone who had loved all sports, it was especially heartbreaking not to be able to play with his two sons, now 17 and 12. "I would be out of breath so fast, I just couldn’t run anymore," he said.
Sisk had some toes amputated and was on a transplant waiting list for six months, a relatively short time.
He said the transplant — which was done at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston after University Hospital in Newark recovered the organs — cured his diabetes.
"I’m as healthy as I’ve been in the last 25 years," said Sisk, who is now studying to become a surgical technologist.
Rosa, who works at a Newark bank, said she had talked about death to Ines Jahira and her other two children, Michael and Baisa Perez, 16 and 14. "It is a conversation I will never regret," she said.
Besides Sisk, three others have received Ines Jahira’s organs. A young man in Virginia who Rosa has met got one of her lungs; two others she hasn’t met have received Ines’ other lung and other kidney.
Rosa said she’s proud of her late daughter’s generosity and is grateful that Sisk, "who we love dearly," has become a "part of my life."
"My daughter lives on in him," Rosa said.
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