Kelli Jantz, who has helped potential organ recipients as a transplant coordinator for nearly 20 years, became a donor mother after her 14-year-old son Jake collapsed during a high school football game. Her son "knew what a tremendous gift organ donation represented. He was an incredibly...kind and giving individual...which made our decision to donate his organs very natural."

Kelli and Jake's Story

Kelli Jantz has been involved in organ donation and transplant for 19 years as a transplant coordinator at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver. During the years and many nights of being on-call, she has coordinated organ donations to countless recipients. As a result, her family has been exposed, more than the average family, to the miracle of organ donation. On September 19, 2004, the Jantz family experienced organ donation from a perspective they had never anticipated.

Kelli’s youngest son Jake was an all-American 14-year old boy. He loved sports, playing X-box and hanging out with friends and family. Jake, a football fanatic, would get up at 5:45am, a full hour and fifteen minutes before the rest of his friends, to get psyched for his football games.

On Saturday, September 18, 2004, Jake was playing in a freshman high school football game in Aurora, Colo., when he collapsed. He was airlifted to an area medical center, having sustained a serious head injury which caused massive swelling of his brain. After many hours of watching and waiting, the Jantzes’ worst nightmare came true: Jake’s brain could not survive the injury.

Kelli found herself facing friends and colleagues in an entirely different light, “talking to the transplant coordinators in person instead of on the phone in the middle of the night and experiencing what I had previously only wondered about in terms of how families dealt with these tragedies. We were the donor family this time.”

Though Kelli had never had a specific discussion about organ donation with Jake, he knew what a tremendous gift it represented. “He was an incredibly generous, kind and giving individual who always looked out for others,” says Kelli. “This made our decision to donate his organs very natural, as it would have been what he truly wanted: to offer the gift of life to someone else.

“I now have a whole new perspective on my job and a tremendous appreciation for what people go through. Now that I have lived every aspect of organ donation, I’ve been able to share that with recipients and am now able to offer a real life answer to the question, ‘How to thank donors enough for such a gift.’

“For us, it means that a little bit of Jake’s life is being carried on and adds a kind of purpose to what happened. Jake’s gift allows us to keep a part of his spirit with us and is very fitting for a boy who is now our angel.

“Since Jake was such an avid football fan, being in the Rose Parade with its connection to football, makes this even more special for us,” adds Kelli.