Donation Helps Family Celebrate Dustin’s Life

	Dustin Petersen

In Lisa Petersen’s favorite picture of her brother Dustin, he’s at the top of a steep, snowcovered ridge, wearing shorts, and a hundred-watt smile. He and two buddies had climbed there one early summer day with their snowboards; and their faces show the exhilaration they are about to feel, skimming down a mountainside near Dustin’s home in Kalispell, Montana.

You’d have to sit with Lisa Petersen and go page by page through the photo album devoted to Dustin to see how happy he seemed just to be alive: A towheaded toddler, grinning up at the camera, a grade-school boy sopping wet in swimming trunks on the shore of Montana’s Flathead Lake, a young teenager persuaded to dress like a punk for Halloween, whose tough act was ambushed by that big smile. Later pictures show that the cares of adulthood didn’t diminish Dustin’s ability to enjoy things, from elk hunting with his dad, to rocking a relative’s baby, to wearing a best man’s tuxedo, to just sitting on the couch with the pretty brown-haired woman he was set to marry.

In November 2004, this 32-year-old man with big hands and a big heart was fatally injured in a car accident, and lay brain-dead on life support. When Lisa’s mother Agnes called and told her Dustin was brain-dead, Lisa says she reacted angrily: “You get a second opinion.’ But after my mom said, ‘No, honey, he’s gone,’ the first words out of my mouth were, ‘We’re going to donate, aren’t we?’”

Through the Petersens’ generous consent to donation at a time of numbing shock and grief, Dustin has been honored in many ways. His gifts of tissue have helped patients in nearly 30 surgeries. Dustin’s tissue recipients, who live in Washington, Montana and Idaho, range in age from 16 to 81. Through bone grafts alone, he helped 10 patients with spinal trauma or painful degenerative conditions; five patients with fractured arms or wrists that could not heal properly without a vital bone graft; and two patients with debilitating ankle and knee trauma.

Dustin’s tendon donations provide an especially touching tribute. Most of his eight recipients are young men who tore their anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs). Often these injuries are sustained during the very activities, like skiing, that Dustin loved himself. His skin grafts have provided life-saving help to two seriously burned patients, and one suffering from a virulent skin infection. As a cornea donor he has given two people sight. Finally, through kidney and liver donation, he gave three recipients the gift of life.

“The only way I can make sense of this, the only way I can live with this,” says Lisa, “is through donation. I’m not happy he’s gone, but it’s so much better that Dustin was able to help other people. It was meant to be this way.

Dustin’s mother Agnes adds, “We’re very fortunate in that we were able to donate.”

And his fiancée, Tonya Johnson, says, “I value life so much now because of him. Part of him lives on. It makes it so much easier.”

From an early age, Dustin had an easy way of giving and receiving love. Close to his family, “He never went through that stage where you think your parents are stupid,” says Lisa. Dustin once described the best time of his life as elk hunting with his dad, whom Lisa says was his “best friend.”

But Dustin also devoted himself to the women in his life. Both Lisa and her mother describe Dustin as a “marshmallow,” and Agnes adds that, “he had the warmest, softest personality. You could hardly tease an argument out of him.” Lisa could always count on him for middle-of-the-night phone conversations to work out life’s thorny problems, or just to talk and laugh. And he always had a hug for his mom.

Before he died, Dustin was completing a program to become an x-ray technician. At an outpatient clinic where he trained, one client he cared for was Tonya, who has rheumatoid arthritis. “He had the best hands,” she says, “so big and warm.” He took her hand in his and that was it. For a second date, Dustin asked Tonya to see a movie, but Tonya suggested they go fishing instead. He was hers.

Tonya’s two boys gave Dustin a chance to exercise his natural gift with babies and children. “He changed diapers, made bottles, rocked them to sleep,” she says.

Perhaps it’s a tribute to Dustin’s loving nature that his family is able to celebrate his life as much as they grieve him. Donation has been part of that story. Says his mother, who feels his loss every day, “Why wouldn’t we make something good out of something awful?”

“If Dustin could come back for only five minutes, he’d say, ‘Just enjoy what you have.’ I’m a stronger person now. I have a deeper love for everyone in the world because of him,” adds Tonya.

“Although it’s a slow and painstaking process, we are starting to heal,” says Lisa. “It’s amazing how much the course of your life changes when you lose someone dear to you. I believe strongly in donation. It was absolutely the right thing to do.