Organ Donations Lead to Life After Death--and to Young Love

They had rushed in the night to the hospital and now, far from home in a sterile room, the mother and father prayed for a glimmer from their golden-haired girl. But the word came fast: Their daughter was about to die.

Meghan Hickerson was just 14.

She had been in a skiing accident. A helicopter delivered her from the mountain to the fourth floor of the hospital. Her brain would never recover, but her heart, her lungs and her liver were strong.

One floor below Meghan’s room was Chris Nelson.

His life was an almost-empty hourglass. His body had withered to a yellow husk, his brain had faded into a fog, and machines and medicine could do no more. The priest had come days ago and whispered last rites.

One floor above Meghan’s room was Kristin Gabrielson.

Her face was pasty, her frail body had shriveled to 95 pounds. Her lungs, hard as rock, could no longer do their job.

That cold January night, only Meghan’s death could offer hope to these two desperately ill strangers. Only her heartbroken parents’ generous decision to let her go--and donate her organs--could give them new lives.

Three years later, Chris and Kristin are strangers no more. They are in love. She wears his ring. They keep house together here in western Wisconsin.

Meghan Hickerson, the sunny, can-do cheerleader who loved to play matchmaker in life, had somehow succeeded in death.

“We’ve always thought this was her doing,” says Meghan’s father, Jim. “She’s just looking down from above, thinking, ‘Ha, ha!’ She would just love it.”

*

No Harlequin romance could tell a more bittersweet tale of life, death and love.

It all began 360 miles down the Mississippi, in Hartford, a tiny town in southern Illinois, where a mother and a father lived happily with their dimpled little girl. Theirs, too, was a love story.

For Connie and Jim Hickerson, it was love at first sight when Meghan Marie entered the world on July 2, 1980, at 8:59 a.m. From that moment on, she took center stage.

By 14, Meghan was a cheerleader at East Alton-Wood River Community High School. She played saxophone and piano. In soccer and softball, she was always the first to get dirty. She had a pie-eyed, love-him-to-bits crush on major leaguer David Justice, collecting all his baseball cards.

Meghan made nearly straight As, but she was a cutup too. She won a student council post by giving a speech mimicking George Bush. And she won awards by the handful, for photography, for science, for literature.

“She had something planned for every minute in the day,” says her father. “She compacted about 50 years into 14 1/2.”

More than anything, Meghan loved to sing, in the school and church choirs, and at home, belting out tunes from her favorite musical, “Phantom of the Opera.”

Her parents dubbed her Ethel Merman. Sometimes when she was parading from room to room singing at the top of her lungs, her mother would shout: “Chill out!”

Connie Hickerson smiles at that memory, then whispers, “That voice. Oh, God, I would kill to hear it again.”

She last spoke to her daughter the morning of Jan. 14, 1995, when she drove her to the parking lot where folks were boarding a bus for a church-sponsored ski trip to Cascade Mountain in Wisconsin. With a motherly warning to stay out of trouble, she said goodbye.

Then Meghan yelled: “How about another hug, Mom?” She ran across the parking lot, and mother and daughter embraced. “She said, ‘I love you, Mom.’ ”

The call came Saturday night from their pastor.

Meghan had been in a bad accident.

The Hickersons drove through the cold darkness to the hospital in Madison, praying their daughter could bounce back because, after all, this was Meghan, the girl who could do anything. Both sensed, though, there would be no miracle.

And there wasn’t. Meghan was only technically alive when they reached the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. Her brain wasn’t working, her breathing was induced by a machine.

Her parents later learned that Meghan had slipped off a trail, hitting her head on a cast-iron water pipe used to make snow.

But when doctors told the Hickersons that Meghan was in grave condition, Connie, red-eyed, exhausted and hysterical, blurted:

“You go back in there and come back with an acceptable answer! This is unacceptable.”

When it was clear that Meghan would not survive, and doctors gently approached the couple about organ donation, Jim turned to Connie as they huddled in a cluttered hospital conference room.

“What if we were sitting here waiting for something to keep Meghan alive?” he asked.

Connie agreed. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said.

First, though, the nurses granted her wish to hold Meghan. She crawled into the hospital bed, caressed her arm, and the mother who can’t carry a tune softly sang, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and all the other songs she could remember, to her daughter who so loved music.

At Meghan’s funeral in Rosewood Heights, Ill., the line of mourners was three blocks long.

Later, in an interview with their local newspaper, the Hickersons asked people to write them of their memories of Meghan. Among the 400 to 500 cards and letters was one with a surprising revelation.

Meghan’s school-bus driver recalled how one day on her route, talk turned to organ donation.

“All the kids were saying, eeehh, and ick, no, we wouldn’t do that!” Connie says, “and Meghan said, ‘Well, I would because I would want someone to have the wonderful life that I have had.”’

*

Another letter arrived weeks after Meghan’s death.

This one came from the University of Wisconsin Organ Procurement Organization and, as is its custom, it briefly described the five organ recipients.

Meghan’s heart went to a 64-year-old retired farmer in Wisconsin.

Her pancreas and a kidney were donated to a 41-year-old Wisconsin man.

Her other kidney went to a 33-year-old New Jersey woman.

A 26-year-old Illinois woman received her lungs. That was Kristin.

A Wisconsin man, also 26, was given her liver. That was Chris.

It was soothing to Connie Hickerson, but there was more, much more, she wanted these five strangers to know about her daughter.

In delicate script on 4 1/2 pages of lined notebook paper, Connie wrote about her joy at Meghan’s life and her grief at her death.

Her letter, forwarded to the organ recipients by the university program, ended: “It would be such a comfort to us to know the progress of Meghan’s new friends.”

Her words shook Chris.

“Every time I read that letter, I just bawled,” he says. “Then I didn’t even have to read it. If I thought about it, I started bawling.”

Before he could reply, he met the Hickersons. And this being the ‘90s, they came face to face for the first time on stage, before bright TV lights and Phil Donahue. He had devoted a show to organ transplants.

Kristin was watching hundreds of miles away in her home in Woodstock, Ill. She cried seeing Connie and Jim and a photo of Meghan. And when she saw a shy, bearded man trembling under the jutting microphone held by the friendly inquisitor Phil, she says she remembers thinking, “That poor guy is so scared.”

Only later did Kristin learn how much she and Chris had in common.

At 18, while attending college in Chicago, Kristin had developed Hodgkin’s disease. First came chemotherapy, then eight weeks of daily radiation that burned and scarred her lungs. By spring 1994, she needed round-the-clock oxygen.

She was too sick to work, too weak to stand for long. It took her a half-hour to get ready for bed because she had to take breaks while washing up.

Chris’ medical problems began at age 2 1/2, when he drank lye. At 10, his esophagus was replaced with part of his colon. Much later, while working at a rubber factory amid toxic dust, he developed hepatitis C.

Doctors discovered a failing liver. His skin jaundiced, he dropped 28 pounds from his 155-pound frame. He told his doctors if he didn’t make it, they could take any healthy organs to help others. Then he lapsed into a coma. The end seemed near.

There Chris was on the third floor of the hospital.

There Kristin was on the fifth floor.

Only death could save them.

And there Meghan was, dying on the fourth floor.

*

Meghan liked to play cupid.

She had tried to set up her cousin with her youth pastor. Two years after her death, they married.

Connie and Jim Hickerson are not the matchmaking kind. But when Kristin hinted that she had her eye on Chris, they gave her a gentle nudge.

Chris and Kristin had met briefly months after the transplant when they joined the Hickersons at an organ transplant symposium. The two also had become friends with Connie and Jim.

In the spring of 1996, Kristin decided to send Chris an Easter card. She asked Jim for advice. Well, if it were him, he said, he sure wouldn’t mind hearing from a pretty girl like her.

She sent Chris the card shortly before they planned to attend a bowling fund-raiser for organ transplants, sponsored by the farmer who received Meghan’s heart.

The night before, Chris called Kristin. They talked more than three hours.

“I don’t really think it was love right then and there,” Chris says. “It was like a mutual feeling of what we had gone through.”

For Kristin, it was more.

“I fell in love with him on the phone that night,” she says matter-of-factly. “It took him awhile to come around.”

At the fund-raiser the next day, they circled each other like awkward 13-year-olds at a dance, barely talking. When Chris left, Kristin moaned: “I can’t believe I just let him walk away.”

Connie stepped in.

“This is the ‘90s,” she told Kristin. “If you’re interested in him, call him. Just tell him you had a nice time, it was good to see him.”

So she did. And the rest is, well, maybe a match made in heaven.

Like disaster survivors, Chris and Kristin have a special shorthand: They talk of organ rejection, immune systems and nightmares. She dreamed of barren branches and dark skies, he of being chased in tunnels.

Both have wrestled with the guilt of surviving, knowing a 14-year-old did not.

“I felt like I had to go out and change the world in some huge, significant way to prove that I was worthy of this second chance,” Kristin recalls. “When you’ve got so many people saying, ‘Oh, God has plans for you,’ you think, ‘I’d better not let God down.”’

Chris, she says, knew what she meant.

“I thought I could never find somebody that could possibly know all I had been through,” she says. “Anybody on the outside, so to speak, would never be able to understand.”

Meghan brought them together, but something else clicked after that. He liked how smart she was. She liked how he made her laugh. And each thought the other was cute.

Jim Hickerson, now 53, says he’s delighted some joy has come from tragedy. He remembers how Kristin looked at him strangely when he told her that one day there would be something more important than her health. After she got together with Chris, she said, “I know what you mean.”

Connie, 40, believes it was destiny.

“I just feel like it was meant it be.”

Last Jan. 16, the third anniversary of their rebirth, as they call transplant day, Chris gave Kristin, a sapphire and diamond “promise ring.”

Kristin is a medical secretary; Chris works for a silk-screen printer. They have no marriage date, but Dave Godfrey, the retired farmer with Meghan’s heart, has told Kristin, whose father died when she was a child, he’d be happy to walk her down the aisle. He calls the couple, now 29, “the lovebirds.”

The Hickersons are building a new life too. They are planning to adopt a baby girl from China this summer. They will call her Lori Marie; her middle name will be the same as Meghan’s, her first name that of a nurse in the organ procurement program, now a close friend.

In all their lives, Meghan remains a constant presence.

“If I’m driving along and a deer runs in front of my car or I see an eagle swooping down in the river to catch some breakfast, I feel so privileged,” Kristin says. “I always think that Meghan had something to do with that. She’s pulling strings somewhere for me.”

Kristin keeps a picture of Meghan in her family collage.

The Hickersons have bulging scrapbooks chronicling Meghan’s life. And her room still has her Raggedy Ann dolls, the New Kids on the Block curtains and her monogrammed Mickey Mouse ears.

But there’s a crib in one corner for their new daughter. In it is a teething ring with family photos and mock magazine headlines.

One says: “How to Raise the Perfect Child.” It features a photo of Meghan smiling.