Rose Bowl float features Edmond boy’s face

Matthew Montgomery Special to The Edmond Sun

EDMOND — Phil Van Stavern received a kidney donation from his brother, Neil, in 1988, after battling a chronic kidney disease that nearly destroyed his life. He recently lost his 13-year-old grandson, Nick, of Edmond, 22 years later on Memorial Day. On Jan. 1, Phil will honor his grandson by riding on a float in the 122nd annual Rose Bowl Day Parade in Pasadena, Calif.

Nick Van Stavern became a tissue donor after tragically losing his life in a four-wheeler accident at his grandparents’ home in southeast Oklahoma.

The float Phil Van Stavern will ride on features a floragraph — an artistic rendition of a photograph of his grandson, who is being honored as one of 60 people from across the nation who were organ, tissue and eye donors.

“Anytime you can put a face on a donation, and Nick’s face was a great face, then I think you are going to go a long way toward convincing people that this (organ donation) is a very good thing,” Van Stavern said.

Van Stavern acts as interim chief operating officer of LifeShare Transplant Donor Services of Oklahoma, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to providing a better quality of life for those who require organ and tissue transplantation. He will represent LifeShare in the Rose Bowl Day Parade.

The family of Nick Van Stavern spent Sunday afternoon at Quail Springs Baptist Church putting the final touches on a picture of Nick that will be designed into a floragraph. His sister, Meghan, nicknamed Nutmeg by her grandfather Phil, helped put the eyebrows on her brother’s picture. Coincidentally, she was provided nutmeg and glue to finish the template.

Since November, Nick’s tissue donation has given aid to 17 people, and his grandfather said he thinks Nick’s tissue donation could possibly help many more in the months to come.

Van Stavern said even though Nick wasn’t a registered organ donor, he and Nick’s parents felt that he would have wanted to be one, especially since he could see how good his grandfather’s health was.

Van Stavern said he has a device called a Thrombosed Brescia-Cimino Dialysis Fistula in his left wrist that his grandchildren, including Nick, used to play with.

“I used to have haemodialysis on an emergency basis, and I could have had it modified, but I just left it alone because I wanted to remember where I was all of those years ago, and what life was like for me,” he said. “The kids love it and I let them play with it. They call it a basketball because it has cross-hatches in it and is shaped like a basketball. Nick would sit in my lap and play with this thing for hours.”

Van Stavern said everyone remembers Nick most as a prankster, a jokester and a class clown. He said Nick was also an entertainer and involved in school plays at his middle school and was looking forward to getting into acting when he got to high school at Edmond North.

According to Van Stavern, Nick was a person of faith and was very involved in the youth ministries at his church, as well as being a writer, and loved to make homemade movies with his grandfather’s movie recorder.

“My wife and I would take Nick to the Wichita Mountains to see the buffalo roam, and go up on Mt. Scott and give Nick the video camera, and he’d do what he’d call the Nick Van Stavern Show,” he said. “He would get up on the rocks and narrate and things … he was just a ball of fun.”

Van Stavern is optimistic that people will be inspired by Nick’s story and in general, is positive that the rate of organ and tissue donors is on the rise. He said there are more people who are under the age of 18 who express intent to be donors.

“We have almost 1.8 million Oklahomans on the donor registry right now, and about one million of those are kids,” he said. “We have one of the highest percentages of people in the country who have state ID cards or driver’s licenses who are registered donors.”

Van Stavern said LifeShare provides three ways for people to register to be a donor.

He said the most common way is for people to register at tag agencies when they get their licenses. They also can go online at liferegistry.org. Oklahomans who don’t have computers can call LifeShare, and the organization will send them a card that they can sign and date then send back in a self-addressed, stamped envelope and it can be scanned into the registry.