“What did your doctor say? Is your heart doing what it’s supposed to be doing?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he answered, “It’s loving you.”

Read Pete’s story below.

HELP SOMEONE EXPRESS THEIR LOVE LONGER

The Love Story Behind the Campaign

By Keryl Oliver

To look at Pete, one would never suspect that carefully prescribed, meticulously taken medication kept him alive. His presence vibrated the four walls of any room he entered. At 6′ 2″ with shoulders that filled a doorway, Pete overflowed with unbridled strength. It matched perfectly with his loud, baritone voice and robust laughter. Everything about him said, “Life!” He was an artist and master craftsman who created timeless pieces using eighteenth-century wood with rich grains and marred surfaces that would tell the most compelling stories of life witnessed if only wood could speak. His creations transformed commercial and residential properties, turning them into art. When he was not building, he was designing and building furniture, home decor, and more, using the same rich wood. We gave his work an appropriate tagline, “Our creations last for generations.”

When Pete was in his late 30s, doctors implanted into him the heart of a young, anonymous donor. He needed this transplant after an unremarkable hernia surgery ‘let in’ a virus that latched onto his natural heart. Pete’s physical strength and endless energy didn’t slow down for the months following this invisible attack, and he chalked up his growing list of symptoms — fatigue, weight loss, and increased difficulty in breathing — to several more mundane explanations. When he finally realized something more was happening, he rushed to the hospital and learned he had been within hours of fatality. The heart that brought life to Pete was now nearly lifeless.

A talented medical team attached an internal pump to his natural heart — a surgery as complicated as a transplant. After several weeks in the ICU, he was released with a thick manual of instructions, the most critical being, “Do not let the batteries run out.” An alarm notified him when he had fifteen minutes of battery life remaining. Pete’s harrowing stories of racing back to his woodworking shop in upstate New York to get the spare batteries and how, more than once, he almost did not make it in time would stop any person’s heart.

The odds are usually stacked against a person in his situation. The number of individuals waiting for a transplant far exceeds the number of donors. Pete survived thanks to events that aligned him with an anonymous donor. His body accepted this new vital organ, and he lived with a rekindled appreciation of the gift that is life.

He was one of the lucky ones.

It is impossible not to think of the other side of this story.

One of the greatest moments of parenthood is the first time a heartbeat is heard. A heartbeat is a sound byte to life in the most literal sense. Our most important role as a parent is to keep our child(ren) safe. We hold them, guide them, love them, and transform our lives so their lives can flourish. To outlive our child is an incomprehensibly painful path to walk and a perceivably unnatural order of life events. It is a never-ending grief.

Without mincing words, the superhuman strength required when the organ donor organization speaks to you hours or minutes after their death cannot be emphasized enough. To envision vital organs, tissues, and bones being extracted from your loved one’s body — a body you once held and hugged — so that a stranger can live a more fulfilled life is excruciating. It is unfair. It feels cruel. Everything inside of you rages against it.

And yet, somewhere deep inside, one knows, even while on that impossibly difficult phone call — It is the ultimate gesture of love.

Because of a stranger’s love and generosity, Pete survived.

We met when we were children. We fell in love as adults.

We were childhood friends. We grew up one street apart, raced Big Wheels around the neighborhood, and, as Pete would say, “Skinned our knees on the same asphalt.”

Life took us in separate directions, and I moved a thousand miles away. A few years ago, a happenstance connection brought us together when I was in New York for a visit. We were no longer married to our respective spouses, and our connection was instant — its foundation was our history, and it comforted us. Over time, we fell in love, and our two worlds reunited, this time under one roof. It was a big love, the kind many strive for and may never experience in a lifetime — and our favorite thing in the world was to be together. We were a unit. And we lived! What a love story we were.

But that is not the love story I speak of with this campaign.

The love story is about the couple who gave Pete many more years of life. They are why I now have my own love story tucked safely in my heart. The love story I speak of with this campaign is about the doctors who dedicated their lives to learning the skills of transplantation. And it is about the organizations that work to connect donors to recipients.

My beloved passed away in June 2023. Thirteen and a half years after receiving the greatest gift a person can give another. It was sudden and devastating. The hole he left within me and his loved ones is vacuous, and I miss him with every breath I take. But he also left me the most beautiful family: his mother, father, brother, daughter, aunts, and cousins, and a vast library of memories of our love that play like a movie in the theater that is my spirit. I will cherish those memories forever.

When I talk about my beloved, I say that he loved so abundantly he wore out two hearts in one lifetime. That was my Pete…

When that family checked ‘Yes” on the organ donor box, they gave a gift to me I can never repay. They gave this to everyone touched by Pete’s additional years of life in big and small ways. And that number cannot be tallied. As an organ donor, his passing enabled him to improve the lives of fifty-two people. He donated cornea, bone, and tissue. Because of his generosity, selflessness, appreciation of the gift he received, and his gigantic well of love, 52 people are touching countless lives now. Yet another number that cannot be tallied.

Like his creations, Pete lives on.

The power of being an organ donor is so much more than medical; it is ultimately about life and love — and all it takes is you.