Man Gave Gift of Life to Father, Many Others

For the Cordera family, life and death will blend bittersweetly at a funeral today.)

Brian Cordera, a 42-year-old Simi Valley man and father of four, is being buried after suffering what turned out to be fatal injuries in a motorcycle accident last month.

Yet the noontime ceremony will affirm how Cordera’s left kidney saved his own father’s life--and how transplants of other organs helped scores of strangers.

“He’s a part of me,” Peter Cordera, Brian’s 68-year-old father, said Thursday at UCLA Medical Center, where he received Brian’s kidney in a three-hour operation last week.

The elder Cordera, a diabetic who was on dialysis treatment for a year, is expected to be released from UCLA this morning so he can attend the funeral at Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth. Wearing a brown robe and slippers at a family news conference, he looked remarkably fit.

The operation “gives me a new lease on life. I’m not chained to a machine anymore,” Peter Cordera said, dabbing his eyes with a tissue at times.

On the table in front of him and his wife, Phyllis, was a 12-year-old family photo of the couple and their seven children. It shows a curly-haired Brian as they recall him: the sunny eldest child who loved the guitar, golf and fixing cars for friends and relatives. A former auto mechanic, Brian took over his father’s newspaper delivery company five years ago after his parents retired and moved to New Hampshire.

Brian Cordera quietly signed the organ donor card attached to his California driver’s license in 1993. His sister, Leslie Whitney of Chino Hills, attributed that signature and subsequent events to a divine plan “that has to do with hope and happiness, not sadness and death.”

Such a signature is not enough to guarantee organ donation, cautioned UCLA doctors. The donor card acts only as a guide for surviving next of kin, who must grant permission for so-called harvesting.

That involved Peter Cordera’s wife, Kelly West-Cordera, who was his motorcycle passenger during the Sept. 14 accident and who suffered a broken pelvis and collarbone and other injuries. They had been married only three months.

“Even if Brian didn’t have a donor card, I wouldn’t have a problem with the transplant,” West-Cordera, 39, said by telephone from her Simi Valley Hospital bed. “He had an unbelievably big heart and would have done anything to help his family and others.” In a wheelchair and escorted by medical aides, she will leave the hospital for the funeral and return.

In most cases, federal rules forbid an organ donor’s family from choosing the recipients. The exception is if a member of the dead person’s immediate family needs the organ, according to Dr. Daniel Shoskes, who performed the Cordera transplant surgery Sept. 26.

A kidney transplant within a family is rare. UCLA performs about 150 kidney transplants a year and only about four over the last 10 years involved relatives, officials said.

Brian’s heart, liver, corneas and right kidney were donated to other people, and skin grafts helped about 40 burn victims, doctors said.

Her grief was lessened, Phyllis Cordera recalled, by “great joy that some other mothers and fathers were getting a phone call in the middle of the night saying we’ve got the organ here to save your loved one’s life.”

Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, medical director of UCLA’s kidney transplant program, praised the family as a “shining example of how to get something good out of something awful.” About 30,000 Americans are waiting for kidney transplants, and some will wait up to four years, he said.

Peter Cordera was not yet formally approved for a transplant when he and his wife flew from New England to his son’s bedside last month. Then doctors learned that father and son shared the A negative blood type, an important match for transplant success. Without the surgery, Peter Cordera might have lived only two more years, doctors said.

Brian Cordera and his wife, wearing helmets, were riding his beloved Harley Davidson when a Chevrolet Blazer made a left turn from Los Angeles Avenue onto Erringer Road in Simi Valley and collided with them, police said. The other driver suffered small cuts to his leg. Brian Cordera never emerged from a coma. He was declared brain-dead after 10 days and then was taken off a life support system.

Brian Cordera had two sons, Keith, 20, and Kevin, 19, from his first marriage, and two daughters, Michelle, 6, and Alison, 3, from his second, and a stepson, Ryan, 11.

Peter Cordera is expected to stay at a UCLA Medical Center guest house for three weeks of observation and until doctors declare that his prognosis is good. His wife said she has written a private letter to Brian, telling him that “every time I hug his father, I will be hugging him.”