Her phone rang in the middle of the night four days before Christmas of 2010. It was her sister in Louisiana—what could she possibly want?

“Hello?”

She hung up. As Monica Chambless dialed the numbers of other family members, she instinctively knew something horrible had happened. Her brother finally answered the phone.

He broke into a sob as he explained—a car had hit Chambless’ daughter, 21-year-old Tommie Cristine “Crisy” Leigh Hadley, while she and her brother were walking in Baton Rouge, La. She was in critical condition, and although doctors were trying desperately to save her life, there was not much hope.

Chambless lived every parent’s worst nightmare as she rode the four hours from her home in Bay Minette to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, where her daughter was being kept alive by a ventilator and a team of doctors and nurses.

The doctor handling Hadley's case sat down with Chambless as soon as she arrived.

“She has your eyes,” he said.

From that moment forward, Chambless said she knew she would make it through the tragedy. She knew the hospital staff cared about her daughter.

But she had no idea that her daughter’s death would keep six other people alive.

The path to organ donation

Two years earlier, when Hadley was getting her driver's license, she called her mother and asked, “Hey Ma, what's an organ donor?”

“Well, you can't take it with you when you die, so what are you gonna do with it?” Chambless replied. “If you die, and somebody needs your heart, they can have it.”

“Oh OK, I'm gonna do that,” Hadley immediately replied. Chambless was not surprised about the split-second decision. Her daughter was selfless, always taking in stray animals, helping people going through a hard time and spreading happiness everywhere she went.

“It’s ironic that her organs saved these people because if somebody would have come to her and said, ‘I need your kidney to live,’ she wouldn’t have hesitated,’” Chambless said. “That’s how giving she was.”

After saying goodbye to Hadley, who suffered a major head injury and had no brain function, Chambless asked her doctor about organ donation, remembering her daughter’s compassionate spirit.

The doctor was shocked to hear a parent ask about donating her child’s organs—it was usually a hard subject to approach. Libbie Harrison, a family services coordinator for the Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency, talked to Chambless about the process.

Because of a quick decision to become an organ donor, Hadley saved six people’s lives that day.

“I lost my child, but I gained six more,” Chambless said. “Cristine accomplished more in her death than most people do in their entire lifetimes.”

The recipients

Chambless immediately wrote letters to the recipients of her daugther’s lungs, kidneys, heart, pancreas and liver.

LOPA sent the letters to the recipients months later, when they believed the patients were ready for contact with their donor’s family.

As soon as he received the letter, a kidney recipient named Danny Allen wanted to contact Chambless and tell her how her daughter’s gift gave him back a life without dialysis, high blood pressure and pain. Because he lives in Baton Rouge, he had seen the accident that took Hadley’s life on the news. He knew she was his donor long before he heard from Chambless.

Allen said he not only feels like he knows Hadley—he believes she has given him a new energy that is much more than just physical healing.

“The energy she’s given me is like a whole new life, a whole new chance,” Allen said. “She’s definitely with me all the time. Now I carry somebody around with me who sacrificed to keep me alive, so I try to honor her with my life.”

July 18, Chambless and Allen traveled to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital to meet Leo Faherty of Jacksonville, Fla., the recipient of both of Hadley’s lungs, along with the team of doctors and nurses who worked for hours to save Hadley’s life before her brain showed no signs of life. They then performed another eight-hour surgery to harvest her organs.

“We got to go up there and tell our story to these people,” Allen said. “They don’t get to see the product of their work very often, and we got to say, ‘Thank you for your hard work. It does pay off.’”

Faherty, who lived on supplemental oxygen and was steadily declining before the transplant, said meeting his donor’s mother, the team that harvested the organs and another recipient all in the same place was surreal.

“Meeting Monica was a very, very rare and wonderful experience for me,” Faherty said. “It doesn’t happen very often that the donor’s family and the recipients get to meet. It was like we were family that hadn’t seen each other in 30 years.”

As Chambless has gotten to know Allen and Faherty, uncanny coincidences have surfaced.

She said she feels like her daughter lives on in them.

“It’s like she hand picked them,” Chambless said.

Allen’s daughter and Hadley have the same birthday, June 17.

Just like Hadley, Allen and Faherty are all extremely passionate about caring for animals.

And the scar left on Faherty’s back after the surgery looks like a pair of angel’s wings, which Hadley had tattooed on the back of her neck.

“I thank her every day for what I’m able to do,” Faherty said. “I look at things now like, ‘Cristine and I are doing this,’ because I couldn’t do it without her.”

Chambless hopes to meet all six donors one day.

The legacy

Without knowing that some good came from her daughter’s tragic, untimely death, Chambless said she probably would not have been able to overcome her grief.

“Organ donation saved my life, too,” she said. “If it weren’t for that, I may not be here, or if I was here, I would probably be worthless.”

Since her daughter’s death, Chambless has turned her grief into advocacy.

She drives back and forth between Bay Minette and Louisiana to work with LOPA to promote organ donation. She tells anyone who will listen about her daughter’s sacrifice.

Recently, Chambless had an idea to create a headstone stencil design that would be offered to the families of donors to designate their loved one’s gift of life. With the help of several LOPA staff members, the design is now a reality and will soon be offered to all donor families.

Her newest goal is to bring her efforts to her home state. She hopes to get 100 people in Alabama to sign up to be organ donors in her daughter’s honor, and she wants to volunteer with the Alabama Organ Center to raise funds and awareness all over the state.

“Everyone should be an organ donor,” Chambless said. “If you’re not an organ donor, think about how if everyone was, there would hardly be any dialysis or people dying from organ failure. You can’t take it with you.”

To become a donor in Cristine Hadley’s honor, contact Monica Chambless directly at 251-937-5794 or visit www.alabamaorgancenter.org.