Thank you, Ben

How an organ donor united two families

by

On a beautiful midsummer night last year, several dozen people gathered for a party at the Clarion Hotel on Rimrock Road. Most were wearing identical red T-shirts with a picture of a handsome young man on the front and a big No. 22 on the back. Lettering above the number identified the group as TEAM KOPPA.

Earlier that evening, team members had wound their way through downtown Madison as part of the National Kidney Foundation of Wisconsin’s annual Capital City Run/Walk. As they filled up on bonhomie and pizza, Jen Bodicharla, née Koppa, got up on a chair to say a few words of thanks. For the seventh consecutive summer, friends and family had come from all around to honor her late brother, Ben, in his favorite city.

This was not, Jen emphasized, merely a memorial. They were celebrating the fact that part of Ben is still living on this earth. Her brother’s tragic death had provided his ever-generous soul one final, grand opportunity to give. “While we were having the worst day of our lives,” Jen told the party-goers, “we have to remember there was a family from Michigan having the best day of their lives.”

As they do every year, John Groleau and his family were spending Run/Walk weekend in Madison with the Koppas. Jen’s words filled John with emotion. For 13 years, two of Ben Koppa’s organs — a kidney and pancreas — had been keeping him alive.

Jen and Ben grew up in central Wisconsin. Their father, Jeff, says that Ben showed an early aptitude for “futzing with stuff.” Ben was intelligent, but what set him apart was that “he could do things with his hands, not just his mind.”

Ben was an honor roll student at Marathon High School. He also excelled at sports. As a running back, wearing a No. 22 jersey, he made first team all-conference his senior year.

Ben excelled at life in general. “You read these inspirational things — stay positive, make every day the best you can — that’s basically how he lived,” says his mother, Kathy. As Ben approached adulthood, his sister noticed the extraordinary effect he had on people. “Everybody just loved him.”

In 2001, Ben came to Madison to study mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. To the surprise of no one back home, Ben earned renown for his ability to turn theoretical models into working machines. “He is by far the best hands-on engineer I have had in my 30-plus years of teaching here,” says professor Tim Osswald, co-director of the Polymer Engineering Center. “He brought his ability to solve engineering problems from his own background, helping on his family ginseng farm in Marathon County. There, he learned to weld, hammer and fix things.” Osswald cites the construction of a special coffee bean harvester, designed to work on treacherous hillside terrain in South America, as among Ben’s signature academic achievements.

Naturally, Ben attracted a band of loyal friends in Madison. “Ben would do anything for anybody,” says Jeff of his son. “That’s the type of guy he was.” Ben kept a toolbox in the trunk of his car, at the ready, for when he heard that someone else was having car trouble.

During his time at UW, Ben did summer internships with Oshkosh Trucks. Upon his graduation in December 2005, he moved north to start work at the company full time.

The following year, on the last weekend of July, Ben and a group of friends went to spend the weekend at a cottage on Lake Nokomis, near the city of Tomahawk. On Saturday morning, Ben drove to a nearby store to buy some breakfast items for the group. As he headed back, an oncoming driver who had just received a phone call crossed the centerline and slammed into his car.

A short time later, one of Ben’s friends called Jeff and Kathy Koppa, urging them to come quickly.

When dealing with the sudden death of a loved one, confusion and bewilderment are the norm. Experts advise those who register for organ donation to let their loved ones know that they have done so. Though family members cannot, by law, overrule a registration, their prompt cooperation can be crucial to a successful organ recovery.

When staff at Aspirus Wausau Hospital started asking about the little orange sticker on Ben’s driver’s license, Jeff and Kathy were still in a debilitating state of shock. It took multiple attempts over several hours to engage them on the subject of donation. Kathy recalls that Ben’s death “was a very hard concept to get in our heads. It took a long time to sink in.”

Ben had discussed his donor registration with his mother. She told the staff she would help with the process. “They questioned me for an hour-and-a-half to two hours about immunizations, allergies, everything from when he was a baby up to the accident.”

By the following morning, several of Ben’s organs were at University Hospital in Madison, and John Groleau was speeding southward from his home in the Upper Peninsula.

John had been a diabetic for 31 years. In 2005, with his fatigue mounting, he was added to the kidney and pancreas transplant waiting list.

John declined an organ match offer he received a week before Ben died. He was feeling good at the time, and was busy building a new house. His family was incredulous. Looking back, John finds the decision perplexing, too.

When, by sheer luck, a second match came right on the heels of the first, John did not hesitate. On July 30, 2006, the day after Ben died, surgeons placed a kidney and pancreas on either side of John’s lower abdomen. As is standard procedure in transplants, the surgeons left John’s defunct organs in place.

The time following a deceased-donor transplant can be one of uncertainty and vulnerability. So medical organizations usually regulate initial communication between organ recipients and donor families. Everything is done through anonymous letters, with neither side under any obligation to send or receive.

Ben’s father, Jeff, was apprehensive about such communications. “What if these people are not even appreciative? What if they’re this terrible person?” The Koppas’ incomprehensible loss was still only a few months behind them.

John was not the only person to receive organs from Ben. He was, however, the only one who sent a letter. When the Koppas received the gratitude-filled missive, Jeff’s apprehension dissipated. The family wrote back eagerly. After many months of communication, John and the Koppas were finally allowed to exchange personal contact information.

As the first anniversary of his surgery approached, John contemplated ways to mark the occasion. In solemn remembrance, he commissioned a special Mass at his parish church to honor Ben on the anniversary of the accident. The following day, to celebrate the new life he received, John planted a maple tree on his property.

The Koppas were remembering and celebrating Ben, too. In spring 2007, they organized a project to install, in Ben’s name, much-needed new outdoor lighting around their parish church. The effort culminated in a gathering of friends and family, many of whom had contributed financially. Together, they hoisted and secured four stately lampposts.          

John finally met his donor’s family in 2008. He, his wife and his kids drove to Jeff and Kathy’s house in Marathon. He was nervous, almost to the point of being overwhelmed. “I just remember walking up to the door, not being able to talk.”

Words, it turned out, were unnecessary. John and Jeff immediately embraced. “I think it lasted a minute or better,” Jeff recalls. “We were head-to-head, cheek-to-cheek.” When John proceeded into the house, Kathy and Jen greeted him warmly. “I walked in,” he remembers, “and saw old relatives that I hadn’t seen before. We weren’t strangers.”

As she prepared dinner, Kathy asked John about a sugary dessert. Given his illness, could he eat it? “I can eat anything I want,” John replied. His diabetes was cured.

John and the Koppas got to know each other better and better over the following few years. But they continued to observe late-July anniversaries on their own. Every year, John commissioned a Mass for Ben, and planted a maple the following day. He would also do a life-affirming and family-oriented activity, like take his son fishing.

The Koppas were, for some time, unaware that John was planting trees. But in July 2012, John invited Jeff and Kathy to join him in the U.P. On July 29, the families attended Mass together. On July 30, Jeff and John’s father, Wade, added a maple to the budding rows developing on either side of John’s driveway.

Since then, the Groleaus and the Koppas have never spent an anniversary weekend apart.

Jen Bodicharla first heard about the Capital City Run/Walk in 2013. Because she had been running half-marathons and become a strong supporter of organ donation, the race naturally sparked her interest. The event would take place, as it does every year, on the last Saturday in July, the day Ben died.

Jen told her parents that she would invite friends and family, including the Groleaus, to honor Ben with her in Madison. Jen recalls that “they did their normal parent thing,” not wanting her to get her hopes up about attendance.

Almost 60 people showed up at the Capitol Square starting line. Team Koppa’s first roster included friends of Ben, friends of the families, friends of friends, coworkers, grandparents, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews. Tim Osswald, Ben’s former professor, came. And, of course, there were the Koppas and the Groleaus, for whom long, strong hugs had become the standard greeting.

“Every time I hug [John], I always think I’m hugging Ben,” says Jeff. His relationship with the Groleaus has helped him deal with the loss of his son. “We did get left behind, but we got left behind with a family.”

It is common for families of deceased donors to find solace in the gift of life that their loved one provided. It helps them to make some small sense of what would otherwise be a wholly senseless loss. “In retrospect,” says Kathy, “we were very comforted knowing that our son wished to be a donor, and his wish came true. Otherwise, we’d have nothing.” Of John and his family, she says, “We’re just beyond words so happy for them.” She and Jeff have relished watching John’s youngest son, now in high school, grow up with a healthy father.

Jen is on the same page as her mother. “In Ben’s choice to have the organ donor sticker on his license, that helped us get this relationship with John. [Otherwise] we would never have had a positive thing to pull out of this tragedy.”

Despite knowing how the Koppas felt, John suffered from survivor’s guilt for over a decade. In his recent clinical memoir When Death Becomes Life, prominent University of Wisconsin transplant surgeon Dr. Joshua Mezrich describes “the mix of exhilaration and guilt that all our patients experience. They wait so long for that call, hoping against hope that it will come before it’s too late. At the same time, they know they are waiting for someone else’s death, someone they will never meet but to whom they will be connected in a more intimate way than their parents, children or lovers — and for the rest of their lives.” John simply could not shake the thought that his good fortune came at an immeasurably high price, a price paid by an extraordinarily decent family.

Something changed for John at the 2019 race. “This is the first year that I felt no guilt. It was just total joy to me. I was just happy to see everybody.” He is not entirely sure how or why he overcame the negative feelings. Perhaps it had something to do with his recent bout with cancer, or improvements in his personal life. Most likely, he thinks, it was his ever-deepening relationship with the Koppas. “We get closer every day.”

Indeed, where one might expect the relationship between a donor family and a recipient to fade as time passed, the opposite has happened with John and the Koppas. Jeff believes that this, more than anything, is why people keep coming to the Run/Walk, year after year. “They’ve seen what happened. They’ve seen this family come together.” Jeff’s use of the singular ‘family’ is, by now, second nature. “It doesn’t seem like it’s two families anymore.”

Jeff and Kathy always knew they had a wonderful son. But during the 23 years they shared with Ben, they were unaware of just how deep a mark he was leaving on the world. At his wake, which more than 800 people attended, an astonishing number of complete strangers shared the profound impact Ben had had on their lives.

In the years following Ben’s death, friends placed permanent memorials to him in both Madison and Marathon. One of them restored a 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger in Ben’s name, adding an “In Memory of My Best Friend” decal to the back windshield. A family friend in Arizona replaced his car’s license plates with vanities that read ‘TY BEN.’ And when the fellow student who designed the coffee bean harvester later published a book about the project, he included Ben on the dedication page.

Now, every July, there is a living memorial to this remarkable young man. The 2019 photo of Team Koppa shows, at the center of the group, smiling Groleaus and smiling Koppas all mixed together. Out front, Jen and her husband Raj are propping up a ‘Largest Team’ sign. On Jen’s lap sits a beautiful toddler named Ben.

The honor walk

A new approach at St. Mary’s Hospital

On a Friday evening this past February, approximately 50 people lined a hallway on the fifth floor of St. Mary’s Hospital. They were friends and relatives of a man who was about to take his final journey, from the intensive care unit to the operating suite downstairs. There, in death, he would provide the gift of life to one or more patients whose organs were failing.

As the group waited, there were moments of muted small talk and laughter (which, somehow, did not seem out of place). When several blue-clad medical staff emerged from the nearby bank of elevators and headed into the ICU, the group got very quiet.

The staff soon reemerged, rolling a gurney that carried the unconscious man. Close family members followed behind. All along the hallway hats came off, backs straightened and heads bowed.

The family got into one elevator, the staff and gurney into another. When they met on the first floor, several dozen hospital personnel in scrubs and white gowns were waiting, lined up along the hallway that led to the operating suite. They had come from all over the building to pay their respects.

In just the past few years, “honor walks” like this one have become a common feature of the organ recovery process in American hospitals. They serve to salute the donor and to signify the solidarity between the donor family and the professionals who cared for their loved one.

Registered nurse Sara Bahrs conceived and engineered St. Mary’s first honor walk in late 2018. She was inspired by the deceased-donor kidney transplant her father had received years earlier. Though the surgery was ultimately unsuccessful, the experience made her a strong advocate for organ donation.

Bahrs had, of course, always been aware that someone had sacrificed to give her dad a shot at life. But at the time of the transplant, she says, she “just didn’t get it.” The full gravity of the gift became apparent only after she saw honor walk videos from other hospitals on social media. She felt guilty, in retrospect, “because I never took that moment to really think about what was happening.”

Bahrs says that everyone at St. Mary’s, from coworkers to administrators, encouraged and helped her to make the first ceremony happen. The hospital now offers an honor walk to the family of every deceased donor.

At the end of the ceremony this past February, after the procession passed through the silent formation of hospital personnel, the family said goodbye to the man just outside the doors of the operating suite. Once inside, his life support was disengaged. When his heart stopped beating, the surgeons got to work.

— Michael Cummins