To the Editor:

Thank you so much for your excellent editorial last week addressing both anatomical gifting and organ donation [“If you want your body to benefit others after your death, you need to act now,” Oct. 23, 2025]. Your well-written piece was both informative and heartfelt.

We invite anyone who didn’t read this well-crafted article to pick up last week’s issue and read about a subject that many of us rarely, if ever, take the time to discuss with our loved ones. Doing so requires us to not just accept our own mortality, but to do so in a way that makes it all too real. Too inevitable. Too soon.

But that willingness to face our certain demise can ultimately be the very thing that prolongs the life of another human being. Can anything we do as a caring person be any more consequential than that?

Long-time members of this community might know our daughter, Kelsey. During the summer of 1995, she was a perfectly healthy 9-year-old girl in between third and fourth grade at Altamont Elementary.  Then, without warning, our world came crashing down.

Kelsey's liver was failing, and she needed a transplant. All of this happened in a matter of days.  With little time to spare, perhaps less than one day, a donor liver became available, and a successful transplant saved her life [“Not a moment too soon, liver door saves girl’s life,” The Altamont Enterprise, Aug. 10, 1995].

Let that sink in.  It literally, with no doubt, saved her life.

The wonderful life that she now lives was made possible by a kind and generous stranger who chose to remain anonymous. We will never know their name, but our gratitude for what they gave us knows no bounds.

We think of them at every birthday Kelsey celebrates, at her graduations, at her wedding, and when we hold our beautiful grandchildren. This person, whose name we will never know, gave us the most immeasurable gift one can imagine. Not only life, but lives.

So please think about that when you are choosing whether to be an organ donor. Somewhere out there, you could be saving a life. Why on earth would you not choose to do that?

Mike and Heidi Moak

Guilderland Center