Glaspy told the crowd at the Life Connection of Ohio’s Spring Seminar for Healthcare Professionals how one day in mid-December of 2009 she was talking to her son — they spoke every day by phone — about his upcoming wedding and how they’d work out more details the next and then how a day later he never did call.
Instead it was North Carolina police who phoned and told her she had to come down to Charlotte immediately.
“They didn’t tell me why,” she said. “I thought he might have been in an accident or was locked up somewhere. I had no idea he was lying in a bed in a hospital. And when I pulled the curtain back, his eyes were open and I talked to him, but there was no response.”
She soon found out her 26-year-old son had fallen from the bed of a pickup truck driven by his fiancée. He had hit his head on the roadway and suffered a nonsurvivable injury. He was brain dead.
“That’s when a man came to me and asked that precious question about donating my son’s organs and tissues,” she said quietly, the memory causing tears to roll down her cheeks again. “At the time I didn’t know what that meant.”
Neither did her family and when she huddled with them that fateful day in Charlotte, she said many were against the idea: “They were afraid they’d cut him up and leave him there. ... But I found out a little more about it – found it wasn’t like that at all. But still though I had to go in and talk to Chris about it.
“I put my head on his chest, heard his heart beating and his heart beat right into mine. That’s when I knew what my son would want.
“Sure he had had his mess-ups along the way, but he wasn’t the bad boy, the thug boy some people thought he was. He had straightened things up. And through it all he always was a giver. He had a good heart ... a perfect heart ... one he could share now. So I told them he would be a donor.”
Henry’s organs and tissue would change eight people’s lives. It saved some of them. And it has forever changed Glaspy’s as well.
Developing a bond with recipients
Last November, 11 months after her son’s death, Glaspy met four of the people who had received her son’s organs.
Donna Arnold — who admitted she was bracing herself for her own death – got his pancreas and one kidney. Brian Polk — on dialysis 10 years — got a kidney. James Benton — given six months to live — got a new liver. And Thomas Elliott — unable to breathe — got Chris’ lungs.
The Carolinas Medical Center helped set up the meeting — it would be done at a Thanksgiving dinner — and a CBS camera crew was there to record the event for what would be a heart-tugging feature on the NFL pregame show, one that was so powerful it left host James Brown in tears and forced him to turn over his on-air duties to Boomer Esiason for a couple of minutes.
“When I walked through that door and saw those four beautiful people standing up there because of the gift my son had given them — the gift of a second chance at life — it brought me so much comfort,” Glaspy said.
“Up to that moment I had never cried for my son. I hadn’t shed a tear. Then I put on the stethoscope and heard my son’s lungs in another human being and that was closure for me. Then I cried. ... And at the same time I felt the love from all of them.”
She has developed a kinship with the four — three men, one woman; two black, two white — and they often call, email or keep track of each other via Facebook.
Her closest bond is with Arnold. She said they talk daily. They call each other “sisters.” And Arnold’s young son calls Glaspy “Grandma.”
The two women spent an early Mother’s Day together last weekend in Los Angeles where Glaspy had been brought in to speak about organ donation.
“We walked around the hotel together and shared with each other what it’s like being mothers,” Glaspy said. “She’s just wonderful. We’ve grown close not just because she’s got part of my son, but I’m seeing how she had so much she wanted to do with her son and her husband and now she can.
“And I’m finding out her secrets. Her husband pulled me aside and said, ‘Can you tell me what Chris liked for breakfast?’ I said his favorite thing was pancakes. I told him how we always went to IHOP and he’d get unlimited pancakes with bacon.
“And he said, ‘That’s it. All of a sudden now she wants those little, bitty pancakes every morning. We couldn’t figure out why. Now we know.’”
‘He gave me this new job’
Chris didn’t know his dad, who was a basketball player from the small Caribbean island of St. Croix. Instead he had a special bond with his mom. He had her name tattooed across his chest.
And after touchdown catches, he’d always find her in the crowd and point an index finger toward her, a tradition she said he began as a kid when he was playing tag and wanted to catch her eye.
In death, her son has given her another signal she said: “He gave me this new job. He wants me to go out and talk about the importance of organ donation.”
And it surely is necessary. Every day 18 people in this country die waiting for a transplant.
To help with that problem Glaspy approached the folks from LifeCenter in Cincinnati and asked how she could help. They told her to simply tell her story, which she did at Thursday’s event put on by the Dayton chapter of Life Connection of Ohio, a group that will give you information or help you register as a donor by just calling (800) 535-9206 or visiting www.donatelifeohio.org.
Although before this she had never spoke in public, Glaspy’s testimony is all the more powerful because she’s simply an everyday person ... with a good heart.
She works at the Family Dollar in Cincinnati and she volunteers at the Santa Maria food bank that feeds homeless and the sick who are in need.
And she also goes around Cincinnati in a T-shirt she had made up that reads “Rush to your BMV.”
The Bureau of Motor Vehicles will designate you as an organ donor on your driver’s license.
As for her own family that was so against the idea, she said they all are now signed up on the donor registry.
“We’re helping people and at the same time we’re keeping Chris alive,” she said, “On the football field he always loved being the center of attention. Now he still is today. He’s making people everywhere realize what they can do for each other.”
About the Author