Family Of 15-Year-Old Organ Donor Meets Recipient

A 15-year-old Tahlequah girl is being remembered for giving the gift of life.

Alisha Girdner was killed in a car crash nearly two years ago.

Her family made the decision to donate her organs.

Saturday, Alisha's family met the man who received her heart.

Alisha Girdner was just 10 years old when she told her parents she wanted to donate her organs, should something ever happen to her.

Of course, her family never expected that just 5 years later they would be honoring her wishes.

If you ever met Alisha Girdner, you were met with a smiling face.

She was your typical 15-year-old. She liked swimming and watching Spongebob, and she liked spending time with her friends, especially her twin sister, Holli.

"Whenever I would have trouble with something and then she would have trouble with something, we would just go to each other with that," Holli said. "We were just kind of each other's backbone."

From a young age, Alisha dreamed of becoming a pediatrician and saving lives.

Alisha did save lives.

But not that way anyone had hoped.

She was killed nearly two years ago in a car wreck. One kidney, both lungs and her heart all give life to others.

"Just to know that somebody else gets to live through a tragedy that you may have, is just an overwhelming feeling," Alisha's mother Sarah said.

Today, Alisha's family met for the first time, a 64-year-old man who now has Alisha's heart.

"It's just an overwhelming feeling to meet the family of the little girl who gave everything she had," Jim Haney said.

Before the transplant, Jim suffered 14 heart attacks. Without Alisha's heart, he would have died.

Instead of praying for a heart, he said he prayed for healing.

"If I could have prayed and kept Alisha's heart where it was, I would have prayed for it to stay there," Haney said.

It was just a few months ago that Jim and his family were told the details of his new heart. But they've thought of the Girdner family every day.

"I woke with the most horrible grief that I had ever had, for somebody that I didn't know, and I realized that a family was burying their daughter," June Haney said.

So Saturday, through joy and sorrow and tears, these two families have become one.

And the memory of little girl, who is forever fifteen, lives on.

"Of course she'll always live on in our hearts," Sarah said.

Alisha's family has written letters to all of her transplant recipients.

The hope to meet with the other two people whose lives were saved because of their daughter.