Organ donor's gifts help about 30 people

MOSES LAKE - Samantha Wibberding was 19, and she was working on nursing program prerequisites at Big Bend Community College. She played hockey, for a while the only girl on the team, and she worked at a local supermarket.

She was good with farm equipment; in fact, her dad Bill called her "tractor girl." She drove pieces of the family's farm equipment in the annual Ag Appreciation Parade.

Then she ran into some romantic problems that got too big for her to handle, and in March she ended her life, according to her father. But that wasn't the end of her story.

At the hospital the family was asked if they would consider donating some of her organs, Bill Wibberding said. Samantha and her dad had been donating blood during the previous year. She was almost up to a gallon, he said, and the family agreed to organ donation.

Samantha Wibberding's heart went to a woman in Utah, named Kimberly. Her kidney went to a guy named Donovan in Alaska. (Recipients and donor families know each other by first names only, Bill Wibberding said, and don't meet.)

But Samantha's gifts to others by no means ended there. Her second kidney, her liver, both her eyes, an elbow and a knee went to people who needed them. Some of her skin helped burn patients. "She helped about 30 people," Bill Wibberding said.

As word got out among donor networks, more requests were made, and the family granted them all, he said. "Might as well help as many people as possible," Wibberding said.

Donovan and Kimberly wrote back to the family, to thank them. Kimberly, the heart recipient, started writing a letter to that future donor while on the waiting list, and finished it after the transplant.

"My life has improved in ways I never even dared to imagine," she wrote. She ran and finished a five-kilometer race about four months after the transplant, she said. "Every step of that race I thought of your daughter and recognized that I was able to accomplish something that only four months before I had thought to be impossible. I expect that I will find myself recognizing her contribution throughout all of my life as I continue to tackle formerly impossible things," she wrote.

"This is an incredibly intimate relationship to have with people I have never met, but I am grateful for it, and for the perspective it has brought to my life. I am proud to carry the responsibility to live accountable both to myself and 'my girl.'"

Bill Wibberding said he wanted other people to know what was possible. "I just want everyone to be a donor."

Samantha Wibberding would have turned 20 on Monday. Family members gathered at her gravesite to remember her, Bill Wibberding said. He buried a bucket so people could leave memorials if they liked, he said, and he threw in a pair of socks because her feet would get cold when she was watching movies. Family and friends tied balloons to the fence, 20 years worth, and Bill Wibberding said he took pictures and left them, so that Samantha might know who was at the party.