Hearts entwined One heart fails. Another falters. A third beats on. And two Georgia families bless the connection.  BY DEBORAH GEERING
Evan Sheffield lost his father young. In 1999, when Evan was 18, his father, Wendell, died of cardiomyopathy (a disease in which the heart muscle becomes inflamed). “He needed a heart transplant that he did not receive,” says Evan’s mother, Cathy Willis Spraetz of Atlanta. Even though his parents had divorced when he was 3 and his mother remarried when he was 6, Evan, the youngest of three boys, remained close to his father and to his father’s side of the family. So Evan, an affectionate, dark-haired young man with an infectious laugh and a passion for skateboarding, became an advocate for organ donation. He talked about it with relatives, and he hounded his friends to check the “organ donor” box on their driver’s licenses. “He would talk to anyone about it who would listen,” his mother says. He even decided to pursue a career in the medical field. After passing his high school equivalency exams—his struggles with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) had made high school difficult—he enrolled at Gwinnett Tech, with plans of getting a degree in radiologic technology. Living with his mom and stepdad, Webb Spraetz, in Lilburn, Evan attended college classes and devoted several hours a week to skateboarding, becoming one of the top skateboarders in the Atlanta area. And he spent lots of time with his girlfriend, Stephanie Lewis. “He says he found the love of his life,” Cathy says. After a tough childhood full of doctors’ appointments and medical treatments to try to control his ADHD, he had finally “blossomed,” she says. When his father’s brother died just after Evan’s 23rd birthday, Evan decided to attend the funeral in Gray, near Macon. He was on his way home the afternoon of June 22, 2004, when Cathy saw her son’s number pop up on her cell phone. “I said, ‘Hey, Evan,’ and this voice said, ‘No, ma’am,’” she recalls. “My heart just dropped to my knees.”  The voice belonged to a Monroe County deputy sheriff. He told Cathy that Evan had been seriously injured in an auto accident, and she and her husband needed to come to Macon right away.
At another hospital in Georgia, Richard Wilcoxson lay tethered to a large, wheeled machine that kept his heart pumping. It was a long, slow decline that had landed him there. The same year that Wendell Sheffield, Evan’s father, was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy—1994—Richard had gotten some bad news. At the age of 45—the same age as Wendell—Richard’s heart was showing early signs of failure. The diagnosis: cardiomyopathy, caused by a virus. A former Army paratrooper who had run the Peachtree Road Race 17 years in a row, Richard had trouble accepting that he would eventually need a heart transplant to survive. Once, he was put on the national transplant waiting list, but he did so well on some new medications that his doctors took him back off. But by 2004, the medications were no longer working. His energy levels plunged. “I would be out of breath trying to get my keys out of my pocket, that’s how weak I was,” says the former baggage handler for Delta Air Lines. In June 2004, he checked into St. Joseph’s Hospital in Atlanta for an operation to relieve the strain on his heart. From then on, he would be dependent on a heart-pumping machine to stay alive. His whole world had shrunk to one hospital room. “They try to get you up to walk you around sometimes,” Richard says. “But when you put your feet on the floor, all of your energy is just kind of gone, and you kind of know you aren’t going to leave that hospital unless you have a new heart.” Meanwhile, Clara, Richard’s wife, commuted each day from their home in East Point to her job as an executive assistant in downtown Atlanta to Richard’s hospital room in north Atlanta. “I didn’t think that much about it,” she says. “It was something I had to do—I had to be there for him. I never lost hope. Even though it looked bad ... I just always thought that he was coming home.”  All they could do was keep hanging on, and wait.
Cathy, Webb and son Christopher drove on the shoulder of the highway most of the way to Macon. Throughout the interminably long drive, the sheriff’s deputy called again and again. “He’d say, ‘Where are you now? You need to hurry,’” Cathy recalls. Finally, during one of the calls, Cathy got the courage to ask him what had happened. He said that Evan had stopped at an intersection, looked both ways—witnesses saw him do it—then proceeded into the path of an 18-wheel logging truck. “It was an intersection he had been to several times. We believe he was confused and thought he was at a four-way stop,” Cathy says. Cathy, Webb and Christopher got to the Medical Center of Central Georgia and raced inside. Evan’s other brother, Thomas, and stepmother were already there, waiting for news. Eventually, when Evan was stabilized, they were ushered in to see him. “He looked like he was asleep,” his mother recalls. “He was just beautiful … just these tiny cuts on his forehead.” But the internal injuries, to his brain and his right lung, were severe. He was on life support. Doctors told the family that if Evan survived, he could be brain-damaged, blind and unable to walk. One told them, “In our estimation, there are things worse than death.” “That’s when I knew that he would never be the same person,” Cathy says. “And I knew how he felt about that.” The couple understood what they needed to do. “We knew what he would have wanted, but at the same time, you don’t want him to go,” says Webb.  Profound loss, and a flash of hope
When doctors asked the Spraetzes if they’d like to talk to a representative from LifeLink of Georgia, a nonprofit organization that recovers and transports donated organs and tissue, they said yes. When they were ready, a nurse from LifeLink met with the family to discuss Evan’s wishes and the benefits of donation. Webb and Cathy stayed with Evan all night. The next day, a neurologist pronounced him brain-dead. A few hours later, Richard and Clara learned a match might have been found to replace his dying heart. Surgery went well for Richard. He was out of the hospital in about a month. As soon as he was able, he wrote a note to the anonymous donor’s family, delivered via LifeLink, thanking them for his second chance. By the time the letter reached Cathy, she had already written letters to all of the recipients of Evan’s major organs, telling them a little about the young man who had given them this gift. Their identities protected by LifeLink, Richard wrote Cathy again to tell her he had some things in common with her son. They both had some Cherokee ancestry, for instance, and shared an interest in Native American history. And they both had adventurous spirits—Richard had jumped out of airplanes; Evan had soared on his skateboard. “We matched not only in the blood type but also personality type,” Richard says. “He said he worked for a major airline in Georgia for 30 years,” Cathy recalls. “At that point I knew that Evan’s heart stayed in Georgia.” Cathy heard from other donor recipients, but it was with Richard that she felt the deepest connection. After months of requests, she finally persuaded LifeLink to allow them to meet—despite a firm policy prohibiting any introductions until a year after the transplant, to give patients and grieving relatives time to heal. The two couples—Richard and Clara, Cathy and Webb—gathered in LifeLink’s Norcross office in February 2005. “We wanted to say thank you,” Clara says. “I will tell you that it was incredibly emotionally raw,” Cathy says. “There may be something behind that one-year thing. But it was a beautiful experience. I burst into tears—here Richard was, standing here, with my child’s heart beating inside him.” A LifeLink representative produced a stethoscope. “Richard opened his shirt, and I heard Evan’s heart beating,” says Cathy. “I had to excuse myself several times because I was just sobbing.” “It was very difficult that first time,” Webb says. But in subsequent meetings and phone calls, the conversations got easier. “The very beautiful thing was the love and concern that Richard and Clara showed for me,” Cathy says. “Richard would call me to say, ‘I’m just checking to see how you’re doing.’” When Webb, Cathy, Clara and Richard get together, the respect between them is clear. But there is something else—a tenderness. Each is aware of the others’ suffering. “I get asked a lot, ‘Do you feel guilty?’” Richard tells the Spraetzes. “But talking to you, you say that’s what he wanted. That gives me some relief.”  Life goes on
These days, Richard devotes much of his time to staying healthy and advocating organ donation. A member of LifeLink’s Speaker’s Bureau, he eagerly speaks at wellness fairs and other gatherings. He is especially interested in giving talks within the black community, where signing up to be an organ donor can be a bit of a taboo. “There’s a lot of misconceptions,” he says. “I see that changing, though.” One of his conversion success stories is his own wife. “She would say things like, ‘I want to have my eyes when I go to heaven.’” But Richard learned to answer that by saying, “You don’t take your organs to heaven with you, because heaven knows we need them here.” “The thing I like to stress is, if their little one needed a heart or a kidney, they would want them to get it,” he says. “I try to get them to look at it from their point of view.” His friends in Toastmasters, which he joined to overcome his fear of speaking in public, joke with him about his new lease on life. “We walk across the street, and they’ll say things like, ‘I want to stand beside you because you’re blessed.’” Richard and Clara hope to get some more traveling in, something they enjoyed when Richard worked for Delta. He told the Spraetzes he hoped to take Evan’s heart on a trip to Barcelona, a skateboarding haven that Evan had always wanted to see. For the Spraetzes, life goes on, too. A day after Evan’s funeral, a grandchild—Evan’s nephew—was born. A few weeks later, they moved to a new home in Atlanta. Cathy, who directs a nonprofit agency called Partnership Against Domestic Violence, says her friendship with Richard gives her some peace, but nearly three years after Evan’s death, she knows she’ll never be the same. “I thought that it would make me feel like Evan is living on, but it doesn’t. What it makes me feel is that Evan made a significant difference in the life of someone else. He left this life giving something back, and not many people can say that, particularly if it’s a young person.” Richard is living proof of Evan’s contribution. “I’m always glad to see Richard and see him well,” Webb says. “It’s actually uplifting.” —Deborah Geering is a freelance writer living in Decatur.
Organ donation facts • At this moment, approximately 2,000 Georgians are awaiting organ transplants. • Nationwide, more than 93,000 people need a life-saving transplant. Thousands more are awaiting tissue transplants. • Each day, 110 people are added to the national transplant waiting list. Each day, 17 people on that list die because the organ they need does not become available. • Blacks, Asian-Pacific islanders and Hispanics are three times more likely to suffer from end-stage renal disease than Caucasians. More than one-third of the 68,770 people awaiting a kidney transplant are black. • Twenty-seven percent of Caucasians nationwide are willing to donate their organs after death. Twelve percent of blacks are willing to do so. • LifeLink of Georgia is the nonprofit, certified organ and tissue recovery agency in Georgia that provides organs and tissues for transplantation to approved transplant centers. • Organs and tissue recovered for transplant include the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, small intestines, bones, skin, heart valves and corneas. • One organ and tissue donor can benefit more than 60 people. —Source: LifeLink of Georgia, www.lifelinkfound.org/georgia | 
