Edition:
January 23, 2009
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Featured in the December 26 The Friday Flyer article about this year’s float, Peter and Jayne Stanyon were intimately involved in the creation of the float when their daughter’s face was chosen to appear on one of 38 gold stars floating gracefully above a canopy of roses. Hollie Stanyon Fouts, 20, became an organ donor after losing her life in a car accident on January 11, 2005.
Jeff Hedrick, 56, an organ recipient, used the occasion of building this year’s Donate Life float to honor the man who, before dying of a brain tumor in August 2004, agreed to become an organ donor. His liver saved Jeff’s life on August 17 of that year.
Like Peter and Jayne, Jeff and his wife, Nancy, have become strong advocates of organ donation and do what they can to promote public understanding of the process by working with One Legacy, the Southern California group that facilitates organ procurement. Each couple represents opposite extremes of the medical miracle.
When Jeff and Nancy contacted the family of Eric Brown, 34, the man whose liver Jeff received, they received a response from his parents, who later came to Southern California for a party on the anniversary of the surgery. On another occasion, Jeff ran in a marathon with Eric’s brother.
But Jeff and Nancy never could manage to meet with Eric’s wife, Sacha, and her two children. The sorrow of their loss was too great, and the emotion of meeting the man who received her husband’s liver was too much for the widow to bear, according to Nancy.
This year, however, when the Canyon Lake couple got a Christmas card from Sacha that included a return address, they wondered if it was a cue that she was ready to meet them.
It was. On December 30, they arranged to meet at the LA Arboretum, a park Sacha and Eric loved to visit, not far from their home. Afterward, they went to the Rosemont Pavilion next to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, where the final flowers were being placed on the Donate Life float.
There, Sacha was with Jeff when he placed a rose in the float’s “Family Circle” in honor of her husband. An inscription with the rose stated, “In honor of Eric W. Brown – lived life and gave life.” It was joined by hundreds of other roses with similar tributes. Fittingly, the Stars of Life float was winner of the Queen’s Trophy for best use of roses.
A story about the Stanyons and Hedricks isn’t complete without providing resources to learn about the cause in which they believe so strongly. OneLegacy, the non-profit, federally designated organ and tissue recovery organization serving the seven-county greater Los Angeles area, announced the recovery of a combined 2,300 organ and tissue donors in 2008, helping to save and heal nearly 100,000 lives. “Less than 10 years ago, only half of families approached in hospitals gave consent for donation. Now, a full two-thirds of the families with the opportunity to donate choose to do so,” said Tom Mone, CEO and executive vice president at OneLegacy. “Never before have the families, hospitals and communities we serve been so supportive of the Donate Life mission.”
For more information, call OneLegacy at 800-786-4077, or visit www.onelegacy.org. To register as a donor, go to www.DonateLifeCalifornia.org.
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