HIS FAMILY WANTED TO DONATE HIS ORGANS.

IT SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN THIS HARD.

- BY DAN SCHWARTZ

Sixty-six-year-old Brian Benadom's heart stopped on a Sunday evening, and it took paramedics 25 minutes to get it beating again. He is unconscious, eyes closed, with a breathing tube taped to his mouth by the time his older brother, David, reaches the emergency department at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, California. After speaking with the doctor, David understands that Brian, who had lived with Parkinson's disease for years, is gone. But doctors can be wrong, he thinks.

By morning, however, an electroencephalogram reveals minimal electrical activity in Brian's brain, and further tests show his kidneys are shot. He isn't coming back. Brian had never wanted to talk about the end of his life and had no living will. But David, 74, wants for his brother what he wants for himself and his wife, Lisa, 69, if they were unresponsive and out of options in the cardiac ICU. He wants to help someone. So David lets go. His little brother, he decides, will donate his organs.

Last year in the United States, 24,020 people donated their organs for transplantation, around three-quarters of them after death. Their donations improved far more lives than that because some organs-such as a liver or kidneys-can be divided among recipients, and sometimes a single donor will provide multiple organs. Surgeons used these organs to replace some 114 pancreases, 3,340 lungs, 4,572 hearts, 11,458 livers, and 27,759 kidneys.