by Dubravka Kolumbic
The Central Record staff

TABERNACLE—Gail and Andy  Clegg of Tabernacle are not ones to dwell on the negative. When their 14-year-old son Sean was hit and killed by a car while he was biking on Hawkins Road in 2008, the grieving parents made the conscious and united decision not to dwell on the darkness of their loss.

“We wanted to focus on the positive,” Andy explains.

Two years later, the couple has taken that attitude and done more than focus. They have positively affected a cause near and dear to them — organ donation. Gail now spends over 60 hours a month, with Andy’s support, promoting organ donation education and together they are helping raise funds for The Gift of Life Family House being built in Philadelphia for organ recipient families to stay while their loved ones receive an organ transplant in one of the area’s hospitals.

The Cleggs’ journey over the last two years has been an emotional roller coaster.

On Aug. 24, 2008, Sean, a soon-to-be Seneca High School sophmore, his brother Brian, then 13, and a friend were riding their bikes home along Hawkins Road when a car struck Sean and threw him 80 feet into a ditch. At the scene of the accident, the Cleggs were only told that Sean had a head injury and a broken leg. He was airlifted to Cooper Hospital in Camden where the trauma doctor gave the Cleggs a more serious prognosis. One of the nurses on duty, who happened to be a friend of the Cleggs, took them aside and explained that Sean was on life support. They then made the decision to donate Sean’s organs.

Gail recalls just feeling that it was the right thing to do.

“Something good had to come out of this.”

“They understand that he lost his brother, his best friend. They get that, so I guess they try to make it up to him a little bit.”

The Cleggs recently went to the Organ Transplant Games in Wisconsin with Melissa, the kidney recipient.

“They feel like family,” Gail explains.

“They don’t feel like strangers,” Andy adds. “They’re so thankful when you meet them it’s hard to not feel like they’re not strangers.”

“I don’t think when you first meet (the recipients) you understand how sick they were because they never want to tell you what their plight was,” Gail says.

“They’re feeling sorry for us,” Andy adds. “You go away thinking how hard they’ve had it too.”

Stefania, in fact, was near death when she received her heart transplant.

“What happened to us was terrible and we miss Sean and we’d love to have him back,” Gail explains. “But if I had to sit there and watch my kid suffer, that would be hard to do.

“I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe that (Sean) was put here for better reasons than we could ask. I just feel like we’re blessed that we figured it out and that we did the right thing. I think the big sin would have been if we closed our eyes to it. We had a choice to make and our choice was to make something positive and try and do something good out of all this than just be miserable, angry and ticked off at the world. We’re not those kind of people.”

Getting involved with organ donation foundations has given the Cleggs more purpose and focus.

After Sean’s death, Gail wanted to learn more about organ donation. She soon learned that although there are a lot of organ recipients that promote education on organ donation, there weren’t a lot of donor families doing the same.

At a recent ball held in North Jersey honoring 300 doctors and nurses that deal with organ transplants at which Melissa and Stefania were scheduled to be guest speakers, three of the nurses in the emergency room during Sean’s ordeal were able to meet with Sean’s organ recipients.

“That was big for me because without them, none of this would have happened,” Gail said. “They took such good care of us and Sean. It was what they did too that made this happen. And they never had a chance to meet a recipient before.”

The Cleggs are grateful for all the support they received from family and friends.

“I can’t even tell you. The whole community has been amazing,” Gail says. Sean’s friends still stop by to visit the Cleggs and socialize with Brian.

“There’s so many other good (donation) stories out there, so many people that have gone through this and are doing what they can,” Andy says. “I’m not a talker, and yet I find myself talking more and more about this.

“It’s a very heart-warming experience (meeting donors). And as for all the people that come out and help us and support us, I find it very humbling.”

Sean’s prophetic posting on his MySpae page the day of his accident gives the Cleggs some comfort that they made the right decision about donating his organs: “We all die ... The goal is to create something that lives forever.”

What’s next for the Cleggs is to continue their advocacy for organ donation education.

“You never know what’s coming around the corner,” Gail says. “We’ll see. Your whole life changes.You just don’t know what you can do until you have to.”