Organ donation: Your final and ultimate act of kindness

Imagine, if you can, being in the unique position of being the only person in the world who can help another human get to live a normal productive life. You’d help wouldn’t you?

As a species, humans are capable of being the kindest and most generous, giving animals on the planet — you give a homeless person enough to eat or get a nice bed for the night, you donate a monthly amount to your chosen charity, you make sacrifices all the time that enable others to achieve something meaningful, and you offer to give others anything they want, even if it costs ‘an arm and a leg’…

But what if it did just that — would you give a needy person one of your limbs? Luckily, that’s not a decision you have to make quite yet, as medical science hasn’t (to the best of our knowledge) successfully carried out this kind of transplant at scale. But they have perfected the transplanting of hearts, liver, kidney, lungs, pancreas, small bowel, corneas, and tissues, including bone. So the question now becomes: “Would you give a needy person your lungs or corneas?”

Is that a procedure too far, and if so, where do you draw the line in making humanitarian gestures?

This thinking has come about for me because I went down a rabbit hole on Twitter this week that was the saddest and yet most uplifting collection of personal stories I have ever seen — so many people opening up about their emotional stress and grief at losing a loved one, and yet fighting against the contradictory social constraints that make us jealously guard the remains of someone who has died, who’s earthly presence has no need of functioning body-parts.

These were the heartbreaking stories of life, love, death and loss, but they were also the stories of the tangible results of the most amazing generosity that people are capable of expressing, even in their darkest moments; stories of lives reborn, people given the gift of sight, of breathing without mechanical aids, of being able to leave the house for the first time in years to feel the sunlight on their faces, the ultimate gift of life.

Common sense tells us that it is perfectly natural to offer the no-longer-required organs of the recently deceased to someone who really won’t survive without a transplant.

And yet.

Wrapped up in our own personal struggles, of course it’s a decision that is never easy to make. Whether on grounds of morality, ethics, religion, society constructs or just simply the pressure of having to deal with sudden tragedy, we often put matters like this to the back of our thinking, preferring not to decide — until that decision is taken out of our hands by the natural deterioration of the available organs.

But, if you understand that those organs have the power to literally transform lives, you must also understand that by not making them available, you are perhaps condemning another person to a really bleak and uncertain future.

So why not take that decision out of the hands of those you leave behind?

I’ll leave you with just one last thought: among all the distractions on the Internet, there is a photograph of a man hugging the person who received his daughter’s heart after she died –— it is worth seeking out to see how much life really is an exquisite gift.