Honoring the Gift

March 12, 2018: More than anything Libby Smith wants to thank the family of the 24-year-old woman who donated her heart and saved Libby’s life. But how do you thank someone you’ve never met for a gift you can never repay?

“I never expected to feel like this,” Smith said, fumbling for the right words as she struggled aloud with the unthinkable. “What if they don’t want to meet me?”

“Then we’ll just be grateful,” said Graham, her husband of 47 years.

Smith’s selfless desire is real. Like many who receive organ transplants, she yearns to connect with her donor family to share progress and show appreciation. While families are encouraged to write each other, correspondence is managed, takes time, and remains anonymous unless both sides agree to meet.

“I wouldn’t want to do anything to step on their privacy,” Smith said.

Still bewildered by how her world has forever changed, Smith cannot begin to explain her gratitude, so she is living a life of service instead.

Just five months after receiving her heart transplant at Mayo Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, Smith passionately promotes the urgent need to register organ donors. Between doctor visits and biopsies, she trained as a LifeQuest volunteer and speaks often in schools with the single hope of making her donor family proud.

“I never thought this would happen to me,” she recently told students at Wakulla High School in Crawfordville, Florida, where she was invited back to share her story a second time.

As a precaution, Smith carried hand sanitizer and wore a gingham surgical mask in the hallways to ward off germs during one of the worst flu seasons on record. She has always tried to stay a step ahead.

At 36, Smith was diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a hereditary condition that causes the heart muscle to weaken. Doctors said she would need a heart transplant to survive. Determined to beat the odds she exercised, took vitamins and enrolled in stem-cell research. Despite her best effort, doctors implanted a pacemaker in Smith’s chest.

The turning point came when Smith worked as a wedding consultant. While it is normal for the bride’s heart to skip a beat during nuptials, it is not for the wedding planner’s. Doctors noticed a pattern when Smith worked the big events. The stress of it all nearly stopped her heart. She quit her job, underwent evaluation, and was placed on the national organ transplant list for five months. She received her new heart on August 25, 2017.

Since then Smith does everything with her donor family in mind. What she eats, how she treats others, and most of all sharing her story of survival. It is all part of getting emotionally psyched up to one day write a letter for which there are no words.

English Author John Bunyan may have summed it up best: “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”