I can relate to Jahi McMath’s family because I’ve been there

I have an inkling of the agony the parents of 13-year-old Jahi McMath are going through. They are the couple who have kept her on a ventilator, although the doctors at Children’s Hospital Oakland declared her brain dead.

Our 7-year old son, Nicholas, was shot in an attempted carjacking while we were on a family vacation in Italy nearly 20 years ago. He was too weak to operate on, the doctors told us, and the only hope was that he would grow strong enough if given some time.

Among all the shocks in those terrible days, one of the greatest was to go into his room and see him breathing calmly and regularly. My heart leapt. “He’s getting better,” I thought — and then, crushingly, a split-second later, realized a ventilator was breathing for him.

Two days later the chief neurologist called Maggie, my wife, and me to the hospital and told us Nicholas’ brain had stopped working.

“Is there any hope?” we asked. “I don’t believe there is any hope at all,” he said, but they would do another test that would be ready in 40 minutes and then a series of tests for the next 24 hours.

We sat there, holding hands, not speaking much, until the first results came in. Still nothing. “After this,” I remember thinking, “how am I going to get through the rest of my life without him?” Never to hold his hand again as we went out for a walk, never to hear him say, “Goodnight, daddy.”

Maggie then said something quietly that changed everything that has happened since. “Now that he has gone, shouldn’t we give his organs?”

Until that moment, there had been only bleakness. Now I saw some good could come out of it. Nicholas didn’t need that body anymore, but there were people out there — you couldn’t visualize what they looked like or how sick they were — who desperately did need what that little body could give. As it turned out, when all the testing had been done, there were seven recipients: five of them facing death, two others going blind. We have lost touch with two them, but almost 20 years later, the other five have active and productive lives.

We are always told not to make major decisions when we are emotional. But this decision had to be made at the most emotional moments of our lives, and it had to be made there and then.

I would not want to persuade anyone to donate a loved one’s organs. This is a profoundly personal decision. But I urge every family to think about it so that if something tragic happens, you will remember what you thought when death was just a remote possibility.

To learn more about organ donation please go to www.donatelife.net.

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Reg Green is a Los Angeles writer. https://www.nicholasgreen.org