The Gift Of Life

Imagine your beloved, strong, healthy brother was unexpectedly, tragically hit by a distracted driver as he walked along the footpath in the sunshine with his girlfriend.

You were in Scotland on your big OE and you got a message from your dad.

"Melanie, you'd better come home."

But Jared was already brain dead. When Melanie Selby got home her family made the harrowing decision to switch off his life support and donate his organs, as he had indicated were his wishes on his driver's licence.

He saved other lives, says Selby, but his death more than six years ago still hits so hard.

Life has changed irrevocably. Where there were two siblings, now there is one.

Selby works for Organ Donation New Zealand as a communications adviser with the job of dispelling myths about donation and raising awareness.

She gets annoyed sometimes at some of the stories she reads or hears, where New Zealand's low organ donor rate is hammered and cultural reasons blamed.

New Zealand's rate is about the same as Australia's - and Maori and Pacific people do donate, she says.

The main reason the rate is low, she says, is because fewer than 1 per cent of people die in the right circumstances that they are suitable to donate.

Her brother Jared was one of them.

He was only 22, just 10 days shy of his 23rd birthday.

He had twice been to East Timor and had made a will because he was a soldier.

She hadn't known he stipulated burial over cremation.

You find these things out in tragic circumstances, so talk about them beforehand, says the articulate young woman who somehow holds it together for this interview.

The panel who interviewed her for her job were a bit concerned about how she would cope in this role so close to home, but as she said to them she thinks about her brother every day anyway, so being able to talk to other families and raise awareness is good for her too.

She doesn't mind telling her story, over and over if she has to, because she gets to talk about Jared.

"While it's hard, it means that people don't forget about him and I get to tell people about him."

He was kind and loyal and she misses him.

But she doesn't think he lives on in those people whose lives he saved, through his heart, liver, kidneys and corneas.

She respects those who may think such things but Jared is dead, she says.

"Sure, his organs are still working but in someone else's body. It must be hard for people who do think they live on and that's why the confidentiality is so important, because you're just grieving so much and everyone grieves differently.

"Hearing stories like that must be really painful for some donor families and must make them want to meet, and that's a lot of pressure on recipients as well."

Donor families and recipients can communicate through Organ Donation New Zealand, however.

You are told who has received the organs, just bare details such as a man in his 60s, a teenage girl, that sort of thing.

And you can write to each other. Her mum wrote to all the recipients and told them a little bit about Jared - that he was in his 20s and in the army and had a beautiful girlfriend (who was badly injured, but survived).

The recipients of his heart, liver and one of his kidneys wrote back, but her mum's a bit devastated not to have heard from the others, says Selby.

"She doesn't want 'oh, thank you so much, your family's so amazing'. She just wants to hear about them and what they do and how they're going and that sort of thing."

Her brother's death was so avoidable, she says.

The woman driver had been trying to open a Coke bottle and had driven off the road on to the pavement.

Jared's head had gone through the windscreen.

He was brain dead and by the time she got home it was just his body that was being kept going on a machine in the hospital.

She says it's not widely known that such a small number of people can actually donate.

"You have to be ventilated in an ICU and you have to be brain dead - and they're the only conditions in which you can donate, so if you die on the side of the road you can't donate your organs."

She wants people to know the respect that health professionals have for the donor.

Sometimes people are anxious about donating because of the way the body may look, or they fear that perhaps the doctors won't try so hard to save them if they have said they are willing to donate.

Not remotely true, says Selby.

The hospital staff do their utmost to save lives and the process itself of removing the organs is gentle and respectful.

The theatre is blessed beforehand and the incisions are discreet.

Jared still came home the next day to be farewelled by his family.

Another myth out there, she says, is that families overrule your wishes to donate. While it is true they can, this very rarely happens.

Families are extraordinarily generous in the face of such trauma, pain and shock. It's difficult, too, because when bodies are ventilated they look like they are breathing.

They're not; it's just the machine. But Jared looked as if he was breathing and his body was warm. "He just looked like he was sleeping. It must be so hard... well, it is hard. I could never pass judgement for other people who couldn't follow through with it."

But these are all reasons why it so important to have these discussions.

Talk about it around the dinner table, she says, with your parents and grandparents and with your children.

She tells a story about a woman she knows, a donor mum whose little boy was killed by a car when he was seven.

The boy had wanted to be a donor and his mother respected his wishes.

"She said two months or a month before he died he'd seen donor on a driver's licence and he said 'what does that mean?'

"She said 'it means if I die and I can donate my organs I will' and he said 'that sounds so cool, that's exactly what I want to do if that happens to me'."

Of course, says Selby, it would be so hard hearing your child say that and so easy to tell them not to worry, it would not happen to them. "But it did and they'd had that conversation so when she was approached she said, 'yes, of course. That's exactly what he wanted."'

By Catherine Masters - New Zealand Herald