There was no premonition, no warning of death lurking around the corner. There never is. It was a happy vanload of ladies and children that started out that morning on their trip to Pondicherry. A bus and a drunken driver later, all that remained was shattered memories and death.

 “Your mother is brain dead” the doctors told Suchitra Sudhakar. For Suchitra, 18 years and in her second year of engineering and her 13 year old brother Varun it was the cruellest hand that fate could have dealt them. They had lost their father, a chartered accountant in London, in a road accident in 1990. Suchitra’s mother, Usha Sudhakar, was just 30 then.

In spite of not being formally trained for a job Usha decided that she needed to work and make a home for her two young children. She started the “Cambridge Preparatory School” in West Mambalam, Chennai and made a success of it. She was a strong person-always determined to face the odds and to lend a helping hand.

Usha Sudhakar has passed on that strength to her children. After Suchitra was told that her mother was brain dead, she was asked if she would consider donating her mother’s organs. Suchitra had read something about organ donation so she was familiar with the concept. But most importantly what came to her mind was that her mother had always believed in giving of herself. She had wanted to donate her eyes and had in fact registered herself as an eye donor. So, in the midst of the shock and grief, Suchitra and Varun made the most selfless decision  that anyone could ever make to donate all their mother’s organs and save the lives of people who would otherwise have no hope of living.

But Suchitra was hurt by the attitude of the hospital in which her mother had been admitted. After the doctors had obtained consent for donation, the family was neither told what organs had been fit for removal nor were they asked whether they would like to be kept informed about the recipient progress. For Suchitra and Varun it would have been a source of great solace to hear from the hospital personally about the well- being of the patients who had received their mother’s organs.

But whatever little news came their way was only through newspapers. They were happy to read about the success of the transplants, the doctors, the recipients but felt sad that there was no mention of their mother, Mrs. Usha Sudhakar without whose gift there would have been no transplant at all. Suchitra said that the only reason she felt so strongly about it was because she felt it would help motivate people to donate their organs if they read or heard about individuals and their families who had actually donated - real families.

It is important that all hospitals and doctors learn to handle such situations with a greater sensitivity of a donor family’s needs, especially after the donation process has been carried out. We all need to work together to carry the organ donation programme forward. Suchitra said, “It takes a long time for the sadness and unhappiness to go away but it makes you feel better when you think about the good that you have done for your fellow human-beings”.