Organ Donors: Making Lemonade from Life's Hardest Moments

It doesn't get much harder than knowing your loved one is going to die. I will never forget the call (It was actually a message on my answering machine.) -- the one that said my father was in the hospital and I needed to come. That call changes everything.

But sometimes you have the opportunity to turn your greatest tragedy into the greatest possible gift for others.

What do you do when that sort of devastation hits? How do you make lemonade from ... what surely cannot be compared with something as commonplace as lemons? Carolyn Glaspy was given a rare opportunity. When her son, Chris Henry (who was a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals), was in a car accident, she didn't have long to say goodbye, and then she had a tough decision to make, one that Chris had never made while he was alive, and one that she had to make quickly: whether to allow Chris's organs to be used to try to help others whose lives still hung in the balance.

Sometimes, as in Carolyn Glaspy's case, knowledge that loss is coming arrives with only moments. Sometimes we are given weeks, months, even years to fight, hope, prepare, and say goodbye. For many, like my father during his battle with leukemia, illness comes, battles are fought and lost, and at some point, the last hope lies in the body of another.

When my father passed away, his organs were failing him one by one. He was put on more and more machines. Donating his organs wouldn't have helped anyone. But he had been on the other side of the donation scenario. My father had received a second chance: the gift of bone marrow from his brother (a living donation). And though his story didn't end the way we'd all hoped (though we at least rejoiced at the declaration of cancer free before graft vs. host disease and the sudden illness that took him), I am still grateful that my uncle gave him that hope, that second (third, fourth, possibly 512th) chance. It's much easier to lose knowing that you (the collective you of doctors, friends, family, the cancer community, and wide world...) fought with everything you could.

It makes me happy to hear stories of others giving that gift. Carolyn Glaspy took the opportunity to donate her son's organs. And on Thanksgiving, she got to have dinner with, not one person, but four people who are alive today because of that split-second decision to give back when she had just lost so much.

As she said: "People of faith believe that people journey into one's life for a reason. Of course, my family will never be the same, but it will also never be bigger. And for that, on this and every other day, I will truly, truly be forever thankful."

For a happy tearjerker, watch the CBS video: Chris Henry's Legacy Lives On.