Robert Brown|‘You lose a child, but you’re so thankful': Organ donation bonds families in tragedy, hope

INDIANAPOLIS – On the night his diseased lungs crumbled into pieces,Robert Brown with one particular jet leaving Chicago’s O’Hare Airport for Indianapolis, Eric Sheets was lying in a bed at Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital trying not to die.

By then his hands and feet were cold, his lips and fingernails purple, his 6'4" body frail. Back in the day he’d played basketball at Terre Haute North and then for Division III Rose-Hulman. He wasn’t the most skilled player – Eric’s self-scouting report: “OK shooter, weak rebounder, very weak ballhandler” – but he was big and athletic, pushing 200 pounds and jumping out of the gym.

On the night of Nov. 30, 2018, he was down to 170 pounds, unable to stand up straight, struggling to breathe. Sheets needed a double-lung transplant, one of roughly 1,000 Indiana residents, and 100,000 around the country, awaiting a life-saving organ transplant. Nationally, another name is added to the list every nine minutes. Each day 16 people on list die, still waiting.

Doctors had been discussing admitting Sheets into intensive care and putting him on a ventilator when the phone call came that morning about a young man in Chicago, completely healthy in some ways, dead in others.

This was hard for Eric Sheets, hard and heartbreaking and hopeful, because for him to live he knew there was a family out there, somewhere, experiencing unspeakable tragedy. His own family had been watching one of their own. His wife, Stephanie, and their three sons, all grown up with wives of their own, had seen Eric slipping away for months. The slope was steeper now, Eric attached to oxygen tanks and still unable to walk from the living room to dining room without gasping and needing to sit.

“I was literally a dead man walking,” Eric says now, which means you know how the story ends. Well, one part of the story. That jet from O’Hare, carrying the perfectly healthy lungs of an 18-year-old freshman at DePaul, arrived on time. After Dr. Jose Garcia removed Eric’s lungs, riddled with scar tissue from their losing battle with pulmonary fibrosis, they practically disintegrated on the operating table. Dr. Garcia completed the double-lung transplant.

Five years later Eric Sheets, 62, is very much alive. He has savored every Thanksgiving since 2018, but this year is different. This is the first Thanksgiving since he flew to California to meet the family of his donor, Chase Crompvoets. It’s the first Thanksgiving since he hugged Chase’s mother, mourned with her, and told her in person:

Thank you.

‘He was living his best life’

Chase Crompvoets loved Asian culture. He grew up in California, where Asian-Americans comprise more than 15% of the state’s population, and in seventh grade when students were choosing a foreign language, he picked Mandarin. Before graduating in 2018 from Anaheim’s Canyon High, he was fluent, something his family discovered at a Chinese restaurant when Chase turned to the wait staff and joined their conversation in Mandarin.

“He was an old soul,” says his mother, Kelly Crompvoets. “At a very young age he could carry on conversations and understood irony and sarcasm. He could make jokes other kids didn’t understand.”

Chase was athletic and curious, trying all the sports before joining a hip-hop dance crew in high school. For college he went to DePaul, following his older sister, Madison. He was in a common area on campus when he heard the music, saw the Asian kids dancing, and joined the party. Pretty soon he was having a dance-off with a kid recognized as one of the best dancers on campus. That’s how Chase was invited to join Lambda Phi Epsilon, considered the world’s largest Asian-interest fraternity.

“Chase was living his best life,” Kelly says.

DePaul’s fall term was ending Nov. 20, and Chase and Madison planned to leave that day for a trip to Europe. The day before, though, Chase wasn’t answering his phone. Madison called his roommate, who returned to the dorm and found Chase having seizures.

“This poor 18-year-old young man, his roommate, finding Chase like that seizing in his dorm room,” says Kelly. “He called 911.”

Chase had no history of seizures, but he did have Type 1 diabetes and was known for, shall we say, not closely monitoring his blood sugar levels. Kelly calls her son “my absent-minded professor.”

Blood tests revealed normal levels, though. Doctors never did figure out the reason for the seizures, which didn’t stop after they placed Chase in a medically induced coma. They continued until early the morning of Nov. 28, when his body convulsed one last time.

“His lower brain stem had died,” says Kelly, who had flown to Chicago to be with her son. “It was about 3 a.m.”

The next few days are a haze. Kelly remembers Chase being pronounced dead on Nov. 28 but kept on life support for several more hours.

“A young woman named Shannon and one of her co-workers approached us about organ donation,” says Kelly, who’d been sitting with Madison at the hospital. “We were just dumbfounded. She could tell by the confused look on our face that it wasn't registering.”

Shannon then asked Chase’s mother a question

“Did you know your son was an organ donor?”

Meeting of a lifetime – no, two lifetimes

On the night Chase’s lungs were flown to Indianapolis, his heart was on a plane to Pittsburgh, bound for the young mother of two boys in her final stages of congenital heart disease. Chase’s liver went to a patient in Chicago, while his kidneys were flown to Madison, Wisconsin, donated to two different people. All those recipients live today, miracles of modern science and the decision Chase had made when he was 15, to be an organ donor.

Eric Sheets was the first of Chase’s recipients to reach out, a letter he wrote last year. Eric didn’t address Kelly by name, because he didn’t know her name. He knew his donor was a young man, and that was all, but the hospital forwarded his letter to Kelly in California.

“I can’t tell you how comforting it was to get that letter,” she says. “We knew we wanted to meet him.”

More than four years after the transplant, Eric and Stephanie flew to California. It was earlier this year, a Friday night, and Eric had pictured the meeting at a public place. A restaurant, perhaps. Or a park.

“Nope,” he says, “they had us to their home. We were there with Kelly, Charles (Chase’s father) and Madison, and people always ask: ‘Was it emotional?’ No, it was more surreal – until we got to know them and they were so amazingly loving, gracious, accommodating and could not have treated us nicer.

“We pictured what this meeting would be like, what we hoped for, and it so far exceeded anything we could have dreamt of.”

Eric and Stephanie spent the weekend at the Crompvoets’ home, where Chase’s friends visited one night and told stories that had everyone laughing, crying or both.

One example: One of Chase’s buddies at DePaul was struggling academically. It was finals week, late November 2018, and Chase offered to pull an all-nighter with the kid to help him study. The kid woke up the next morning on the couch, tucked into a blanket, his head on pillow.

“He found out later that was Chase’s blanket and pillow,” Eric says. “That’s the kind of kid he was.”

When Eric returned to Indianapolis, to his family and his work at Rolls Royce as an experimental jet engine tester, he came home knowing he now had a second family in California. When that visit had grown heavy, Eric weeping about Chase’s sacrifice, Chase’s grandma would hold his hands and gently say, “No, no, no, no – you can’t think like that. We’re just happy you’re doing so well.”

And Kelly would say: “You lose a child, but you’re so thankful to know he has been a gift of life to someone else. It’s the most we can hope for.”

This week in California, Kelly and her family will celebrate Thanksgiving as they have every year since 2019, with a visit from Chase’s friends.

“He had just amazing, loyal, wonderful friends,” she says. “We’re so fortunate to see them. They were boys before, and now they are becoming men. We kind of live vicariously through them.”

About 2,000 miles to the east, Eric Sheets will celebrate Thanksgiving as he has every year since 2019. He and Stephanie will gather with their three sons and four grandkids – two born before the transplant, two after – and Eric will lead them in prayer before their meal. He will pray for his family in Indiana and his family in California, and while he is not an overly dramatic man, his voice rises as he considers the fifth Thanksgiving of the rest of his life.

“We’re just so grateful,” he says. “Stephanie and our sons and their wives and now four grandkids. I’ve got two grandkids I never would’ve seen!

“Oh my gosh,” he says, quieter now. “Life is so good.”

Gregg Doyel is a columnist at the Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow him on X, formerly know as Twitter,@GreggDoyelStar and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.