A Life Everlasting: The Extraordinary Gift of Thomas Ethan Gray

Gray, director of communications for the American Association of Tissue Banks, personally recounts how her six-day-old son’s death helped save countless lives, detailing the dogged purpose and exuberant hope that fueled her daunting journey into the world of medical research. Gray and her husband, Ross, knew months before she gave birth to identical twin sons that one of them, Thomas, had a lethal neural tube defect, and they quickly recognized its “higher purpose”: that his death would allow organ and tissue donations. Knowing only that Thomas’s liver was recovered for a study on liver cell preparation, that his umbilical cord blood would be used for genetic studies, and that his eyes would go to “a very special education research project,” Gray methodically tracks down the places that received the donations and the researchers who studied them. “In his short but treasured life,” she proudly writes, Thomas accomplished nothing less than a contribution “to the advancement of modern medicine.” Gray writes movingly of the loss of her son, the research it aided, and the career to which it led her at the AATB as an advocate for organ and tissue donation. With this remarkable account, Thomas’s legacy will continue to inspire. (Sept.)