Ultimate Legacy: The Gift Of Life

By Melanie McFarland

Seattle Times staff reporter

Beside each entrance to the Bellevue Hyatt Regency ballroom, where organ donors and recipients gathered yesterday, were nearly empty baskets of tissue packets.

People clutched the small, soft packages tightly at tables around the room, ready to dab away tears that couldn't be held back.

But the Donor Family Recognition Ceremony was a celebration, solemn rather than mournful. Approximately 350 people, mainly donors' families and friends, listened to tales of gratitude from those benefiting from their beloved's gifts, surrounded by a flock of memorabilia set up on tables around the room's outskirts.

They shared worn playthings, souvenirs, knickknacks, letters, newspaper clippings and photos with each other.

A grandfather's certificates of accomplishment and his family portraits shared space with a toddler's scrapbook, filled with buttons, gems, sparkling pieces of Easter grass and swatches of soft fabric she once loved. A dinged hockey stick wrapped in duct tape lay crosswise in front of its owner's smiling photograph.

These are what donor families have left of their mothers, fathers, daughters and sons - these and, as yesterday's ceremony reminded them, the walking, breathing legacy of their loved ones carried on in the bodies of others.

This was the fourth year LifeCenter Northwest Donor Network and other donor groups have hosted a donor-recognition ceremony, part of their ongoing effort to raise awareness about organ donation.

Nationwide, the number of patients on the wait list for an organ donation hovers around 76,000, and every 14 minutes, another name is added to that list, according to the organization. Each day 16 of those patients die.

Such a realization makes it easier for Elaine Grimstad to smile at the memory of her husband, Kenneth Grimstad, who died two years ago from injuries sustained in a fall.

"He was a man of faith and very generous," she said, "This is something he would have done, but it helps me too. I understand 13 people were helped by his donation. It gives me a real purpose because it makes me feel like his death was not in vain."

Recipients like 17-year-old Allison Hansen, an avid campaigner for LifeCenter and other organ-donor agencies, take that debt seriously.

Two years ago Hansen, a smiling, healthy-looking teenager, was diagnosed with familial dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease or disorder of the heart muscle that she shared with her brother, Jacob.

In 1994 Jacob Hansen, then 12 years old, became the youngest patient to receive a heart transplant in Washington. Allison was 11 at the time. "I kind of took resentment to that because I was the child in the family that didn't have an issue," she said.

But four years later, Allison's doctors told her she had six months to live. If not for a heart donated by a 17-year-old from Eastern Washington, whose name she doesn't know, she wouldn't be alive to pursue her dreams of working with the deaf and having a family.

"I try not to let a minute pass when I complain about my scar hurting or worry that my hair doesn't look right, because my donor is someone who doesn't get to do that anymore," Hansen said.

As names of donors were read at the podium, their family and friends stood up in recognition. Organizers presented each attendee with tulip bulbs to plant in their memory.

Kim Kime-Parks, mother of Kristopher Kime, who was killed during last spring's Mardi Gras riots in Seattle, also attended the event. Seven months after Kris' death, Kime-Parks wears a button emblazoned with a photo of him wearing a tuxedo.

She smiles with excitement while recalling and laughing at memories they shared, including the moment he told her he was an organ donor.

Around Christmas, she said, she was telling him about papers he might need in case something happened to her, and they came across her old driver's license.

"He turned it over and said, 'Oh, Mom, you're an organ donor. I'm an organ donor, too,' " she recalled. When Kime died only a few months later, she said, "There was no decision for me. It was the only decision."

Kime's donated organs have saved or improved the lives of eight people so far. His mother maintains contact with five recipients, and recently invited them to her home to celebrate what would have been her son's 21st birthday.

Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company.

This article posted November 9, 2001.