22^nd Alaska State Legislature
Information from Representative Con Bunde

When I was living and teaching back east, a friend of mine was waiting for a liver transplant. He was yellow and skinny, and always had a portable phone with him, but he seemed fine. I didn't know him very well, but I knew he came from Alaska. In 1992, a bunch of us friends gathered for our annual Thanksgiving dinner. I hadn't seen Steve for a while, but he was there. His appearance was frightening. I had never seen anyone just concentrate on staying alive before. But there he was, determined to share Thanksgiving with his friends and his Mom, who had moved down from Fairbanks to help him.

A few days later, on December 2nd, we learned that Steve had "gotten the liver." We all cheered, knowing that he would have died very soon without a transplant. We grieved for the family who lost a loved one between Thanksgiving and Christmas and silently thanked them for their incredibly generous gift. We prayed for Steve's recovery and were thrilled when he was released from the hospital on Christmas Day and came back to bowling night in January.

I married Steve in April 1994, and in 1996 we moved back to Alaska. An archivist, he is now the State Records Manager at the State Archives. He works to ensure that important state documents are preserved and available to the public.

There's not a day that goes by that he and I don’t think of the parents of that young man. Steve wrote to them the day before our wedding, thanking them for their gift and telling them what they had made possible. On the worst day of their lives, a social worker came to them in a waiting room and asked if they would like to donate their son's organs and tissues. On the worst day of their lives, they, like so many relatives in Alaska and across the country, said they knew that's what their son would have wanted.

Please, talk to your family about your wishes concerning organ donation.

Fifty-five is just a number. But to those fifty-five families whose loved ones died waiting for a life-saving liver, heart, or other organ, it means so much more. One of the fifty-five is Sean Roth. Sean was a little boy who loved dinosaurs and talked to his mom of his dream of being able to ride a bike by himself. Four-year old Sean had a disease called pulmonary hypertension where the pressure in the lungs was too great, so his heart wore out. Sean and his mom and his favorite dinosaur moved to the Ronald McDonald house in Los Angeles to wait for the gift off a heart-lung donation that did not come in time. Sean died in his mother's arms at the Ronald McDonald House on December 20, 1998. This little boy who never got his wish to ride a bike himself then gave the greatest gift of sight to two people through corneal donation.

There are fifty-five stories like this with the Alaskans who have died waiting. There are currently eighty-five families from Alaska hoping to have a different and happier story to tell. If someone such as Sean could give such a magical gift, won't you?

Alaska has one of the highest rates of organ and tissue donation in the country. That's not surprising, given our tradition of helping our neighbors in times of crisis. Nevertheless, we need to keep reminding ourselves, and our families, of the many Alaskans who are waiting for the gift of life right now, and those who will wait in the future.