Donor is Like a Member of the Family
On a recent visit to Sicily, where four of Nicholas’ recipients live, I was invited to speak to the kindergartners at the Rita Atria School in Palermo, who listened breathlessly to the tale of a boy, just a year or two older than themselves, who saved other children when no one else in the world could. Afterward I talked with the principal about the visit Maggie and I made to the same school 21 years ago and were received with the same rapt attention then too. It dawned on me that these were the little children of the little children we talked to on that first visit: a whole generation of families for whom Nicholas has been part of their lives.
This is my son, seven-year old Nicholas Green, of Bodega Bay, California, who was shot in an attempted carjacking in Italy while we were driving on the main road south from Naples on a family vacation. My wife, Maggie, and I donated his organs and corneas, which went to seven very sick Italians, four them teenagers. Two of the seven were going blind, all the others could have died at any time. In the next ten years, organ donation rates in Italy, which were then just about the lowest in Europe, tripled – a rate of increase no other country came close to – so that thousands of people are alive who would have died. All around the world his story brought people’s attention to the acute shortage of donated organs and became known as ‘The Nicholas Effect.’