'Matt Gave 5': 20 years after his death, Matt Abraham’s heart still beats in a Pennsylvania mother's chest

When Jack and Kathy Holland said good-bye to their 14-year-old daughter Katy as she was wheeled into surgery at Cleveland Clinic just before midnight on Sept. 29, they knew the chances were less than 50-50 that they would see her alive again. 

Katy had been born with a heart condition. Thirty-six hours after her birth in an Erie, Pennsylvania, hospital, an ambulance had whisked her away to the neonatal intensive care unit at Children's Hospital in Buffalo, New York, 90 miles away. "They weren't even sure she would make it to Buffalo," Kathy said recently.

Katy did make it to Buffalo, and during her next 14 years she survived procedures in other hospital everywhere from Boston to Dallas and several places in between. She underwent three open-heart surgeries and more than a dozen heart catheterizations and other procedures. Still, she was always "the most positive kid," Kathy said. That positive attitude and strong determination kept her going. In fact, throughout her elementary school years, she managed to hide the health challenges that should have held her back.

"She wasn't a sporty person, but she was active in school. She was on the student council and involved in that kind of way," Kathy said. 

Preparing for a time when there was nothing left to do

But Katy's condition gradually worsened, and in May at the end of her eighth-grade year, the Hollands were at the Cleveland Clinic for what they thought was yet another procedure – this time to install a piece of hardware to patch a hole in Katy's heart. But instead of seeing the physician who was to install the hardware, a different doctor came into the exam room, one who was introduced to them as a specialist in "heart failure and transplantation." 

The change was surprising because the Hollands had been told throughout Katy's life that she would probably never be a candidate for a heart transplant and they should prepare themselves for a time when all options had been tried and there was nothing left to do for her. 

Instead, as they recall now, this new doctor whirled into the room like "a force of nature," barking questions, giving orders and ending by saying, "We'll have you listed by June." 

It took a minute for the shell-shocked family to realize the doctor, Gerard Boyle, meant Katy would be added to the heart transplant list. 

On July 3, after the necessary tests were completed, Katy officially joined the transplant list. But her condition wasn't severe enough to put her at the top of the list. Instead, they were told, "it could be tomorrow – or two years from now."

In September, she enrolled as a freshman at her three-story Catholic high school in Erie. Climbing the stairs there was out of the question, so she was one of the few students who had a key to the school's elevator. Even with that accommodation, she could only attend classes part-time. 

Katy excelled as a student anyway, and "she had such a zest for life," her mother said. But three weeks into the school year, her health deteriorated even more. She was taking multiple naps every day, including a nap after dinner – because eating was exhausting. On Sept. 27, an ambulance took her back to the Cleveland Clinic, where she was started on immunity-suppressing IV medications that meant "she would be there until she got a transplant," Kathy Holland said.

"She was desperately sick," Kathy remembered. "Your oxygen level is supposed to be 100. Hers was 74."

At 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 29, Dr. Boyle told the Hollands Katy's status had been bumped to "critical" on the transplant list. He left, but then, "seven minutes later, they came flying back into our room and said, 'You're going to the OR. We found a heart,'" Kathy said. 

'It's what Matt would have wanted'

Eight hundred miles away, in Springfield, another family in another hospital was also saying good-bye to a beloved child. But for John and Melinda Abraham, and the army of extended family and friends surrounding them, there was no 50-50 chance. 

A few nights earlier, the Abrahams' 9-year-old son Matt, while sleepwalking, had climbed over the upstairs balcony railing of the Abrahams' Gainesville home and had fallen to the first-floor entryway, striking his head on the narrow post of a straight-backed chair. Suffering a traumatic brain injury, he had been flown to what is now Mercy Hospital in Springfield. 

Despite surgery and other advanced measures, by mid-week tests showed that Matt had no brain activity; there was no way he could recover. As Melinda sat at Matt’s bedside, holding his hand, the hospital chaplain touched her shoulder and gently asked, "Would you like to speak to the representative about organ donation?” 

Melinda reacted instantly and strongly. “No! I’m not going to talk about that right now!” she said. 

The chaplain nodded understandingly. “Okay,” she answered quietly. “But it takes time to plan it. If it’s something you might want to do, we need to talk about it because it takes time to set everything up.”

Early in their relationship, Melinda and John had talked about organ donations, and both agreed that's what they would want – for themselves. The thought that they would have to make that decision for Matt or his older sister, Alyssa, hadn't entered their minds. Melinda said later, "I know I answered the way I did because by agreeing to donate Matt's organs, I would be saying I had given up hope. And I just wasn’t ready to do that.” 

    When John came back into the room, however, they both knew what had to be done. “Once we were together, we never questioned it,” Melinda said. “We knew Matt wasn’t going to make it. And we knew that’s what we wanted to do. It’s what Matt would have wanted too.”

The transplantation process started up. The organ transplants were organized by Mid-America Transplant Services, which made arrangements for Matt’s left kidney to go an 18-year-old girl, his right kidney to a 68-year-old man and his liver to a 2-year-old girl; all three of those recipients lived in Illinois. A segment of his intestine went to a 9-year-old girl in Maryland.

A short time later, a team arrived in Springfield on the Cleveland Clinic's jet to pick up Matt's heart, the last organ to be removed, and rush it back to Cleveland where a 14-year-old Pennsylvania girl was probably a few days away from death: Katy.

"They told us when the team had left the donor hospital, when the jet landed and when they were in the ambulance headed back to the clinic," Kathy said. The room where the family waited was opposite the elevator. When Kathy saw two surgeons and a nurse, pulling a cooler, emerge from the elevator, "I screamed," she said.

 The surgery, which started around midnight, took 13 hours. The surgical team kept the family updated, and at one point, a surgeon came out and told them the heart had "started right up" when it was implanted into Katy's chest. "It worked beautifully," he said. 

20 years later

The events in this story so far all happened 20 years ago last week, in September 2005. 

And while the grief of losing their son is still deeply felt by the Abrahams and their extended family, a lot of good things have happened in those 20 years too. A couple of really special events happened last spring.  

For a year after a transplant is completed, correspondence between organ-donor families and organ recipients is carefully monitored by the transplant service, with only first names used. Notes to and from each family go to the service, which forwards them to the addressee. The Abrahams sent notes to the five recipients of Matt's organs. They received one note from the 68-year-old kidney recipient, but when they wrote back there was no response.

Then came a card and letter from Kathy Holland, with a photograph of Katy tucked inside. 

"I can still remember writing that letter," she said last week. "I went down to the hospital gift shop and got a card and wrote them a letter. I thanked them, and I wrote about finally being able to look beyond today and imagine where tomorrow will bring because of the gift they had given us."

The families corresponded, and later, following ATS guidelines, they spoke by telephone. A friendship developed.  

A time of celebration happened in 2008, when Dylan Abraham, Melinda and John's third child, was born. Eleven months later, in May 2009, John, Melinda, Alyssa and baby Dylan drove to Erie to attend Katy's graduation from Villa Maria Academy, a relatively small Catholic school in Erie. Katy's dad, Jack, held baby Dylan on his lap throughout the graduation ceremony. 

“Everyone there knew about Katy’s case and had followed her situation,” Melinda said in a 2009 story in the Times. “Before the graduation ceremony, Kathy told us, ‘Everyone’s going to know who you are.’ And they did. It felt like everyone in the audience wanted to come up afterward and say thank you. Sometimes it was just a touch on the arm or a pat on the back. It made us realize the impact Matt’s heart had made, not just on Katy and her family, but on everyone who knew her.”

The two families kept in touch. As the years passed, the Abrahams congratulated Katy on her college graduation – and then her master's degree graduation a couple of years after that. Next, they celebrated Katy's marriage to Michael, and they were happy to know she had launched a successful career as a licensed professional counselor. 

Then, earlier this year, came more good news: Katy and Michael adopted a baby, Andrew – to be called Drew – and Katy, now 34, is a full-time mom. 

Through all these busy years, and all these happy events, Matt's heart has been beating steadily in Katy's chest. She told the Abrahams in one message that she thinks of him often. "Every day, he is My Matt," she said.

"We, as a family, have never, ever taken for granted the gift they gave us," Kathy Holland said, meaning the Abrahams' decision to donate Matt's organs. "It's such a selfless act, what they did." 

She also sees the story of the transplant as being a factor in Katy's two siblings' rewarding careers. Katy's sister, Kelly, is a nurse practitioner, and now, with a doctorate in nursing practice, she's teaching full-time. Katy's younger sibling, Kevin, became a Catholic priest. He officiated at Katy's wedding to husband Michael and baptized baby Drew.

"The three of them are so tight," Kathy said. "I attribute that to what they saw growing up. With Katy's situation, we never knew when the other shoe was going to drop." 

John and Melinda's daughter Alyssa was also close to her brother Matt. Alyssa holds a master's degree in library and information science and now lives with her husband, Andrew Eller, in Seattle, where he is completing his residency in internal medicine. The Abrahams' son Dylan, who sat on the lap of Katy's dad when the Abrahams attended Katy's high school graduation in 2009, is now a senior at Gainesville High School.

An unexplainable closeness

Earlier this year, the happy news that Katy and Michael had adopted Drew coincided with the Abraham family's vacation travel plans. For a long time, Melinda's mother, Kay Rackley Young, has had a bucket list of places she has hoped to visit, and near the top of the list was Niagara Falls. That idea appealed to Melinda, John and Dylan too, so they began planning the trip. 

As they looked at their route, they realized they would be passing near Erie, Pennsylvania. Melinda messaged Kathy asking if they might get together during the trip, and of course Kathy quickly agreed. Then, when Melinda's sisters, Hope Hillhouse and Angie Calvert, heard about the trip, they wanted to go too. And so did some of their family members.

In mid-May, 10 of them climbed into a rented van, and off they went to Niagara Falls – with a stop along the way to see some very important people. The morning of their visit, Jack and Kathy, Katy, Michael and baby Drew arrived at the Abraham group's bed-and-breakfast inn, and for a couple of hours, they share a happy time of shared laughter and joy.  

Drew pretty much stole the show, of course. Watching him, Katy noticed "something cool" about the way her toddler interacted with the Abrahams. "He's not an anxious kid, but sometimes he needs a minute when he meets someone new. Generally, kids this age don't go to people they don't know. But Drew went right to Melinda--just went right to her," she said. 

And Drew also went to Dylan. It reminded Katy of the connection she had felt with baby Dylan when he was the same age – 11 months old – and the Abrahams came to her high school graduation. "He was my buddy the whole weekend," she said. "There's a picture of me and baby Dylan. I'm holding him in my graduation gown. That's what struck me. I felt this closeness with him. It was unexplainable, but it was there."

This time, she said, "it was Dylan holding baby Drew" a lot of the time the two families were together. "It just seemed that Drew felt they were very familiar."  

A gathering of grateful hearts

During their visit, a sense of shared appreciation filled the room. While Katy is extraordinarily grateful for Matt's strong and steady heart beating in her chest, the Abrahams are also grateful that Katy and her family welcomed them to share the milestone events that Matt's heart empowered Katy to experience. The two families swapped stories and laughter as though they were close friends. Which, for 20 years, they have been. 

Not surprisingly, these are people who enthusiastically promote organ donation. The Hollands all have organ donation designations on their driver's licenses. Although Katy can't be an organ donor because of her medical history, "I can still give my skin and eyes," she said. "I can help burn victims."

On the last weekend in September, the Abrahams members of their large extended family gathered in their Gainesville home to remember Matt on the 20-year anniversary of his death in 2005. They looked through scrapbooks of photos and viewed home videos, remembering the active, fun-loving boy they knew and cherished.  

The Abrahams have also designated themselves as organ donors. John and Melinda have drawn attention to organ donation with the "MATGV5" (Matt gave 5) license plate that's been on Melinda's vehicle for 20 years. She also distributes bright green "Be an Organ Donor" decals for car windows and other surfaces, and she has spoken to church and civic groups about Matt's story and the gift of organ donation.

The Abrahams equate donating blood with donating organs because both can save lives. Until he had a heart attack and began taking blood thinners in 2019, John was a regular donor at every blood drive held by his employer, Baxter Healthcare (now Vantive), in Mountain Home, Arkansas. He donated a whopping 167 units of blood – nearly 21 gallons – before the medication made him ineligible. Melinda is also a frequent blood donor and has donated a total of 45 units; she would gladly donate more frequently, she said, but her job as Ozark County's public administrator sometimes means she is busy elsewhere when local blood drives are held.

The Abrahams' daughter Alyssa, who was 11 when Matt died, became a regular blood donor when she turned 16, and she gave blood throughout her college years then while working as a librarian and now as a resident of Seattle. 

Following family tradition, Dylan Abraham has joined the blood-donation bandwagon. He first donated at a high school blood drive last year, after he turned 16 and became eligible.  

Melinda and John also support their community in other ways. Through fundraisers, they have raised thousands of dollars for a scholarship named for Matt that is presented to a GHS graduating senior each year. And Melinda is well known for the baked goods she donates each year to the Lions Club auction that helps fund the summer ball program, in which Matt participated. 

Since Matt's death – and especially since they've connected with Katy and her family – the Abrahams have asked others to be aware of the potential that organ donation has to save lives and create something good in the midst of tragedy and heartache. As difficult as the subject might be, Melinda encourages people talk about it with family members. "Know how they feel about it," she said. "I wish no one would ever have to endure what our family went through. But these things do happen, and if you’ve thought about it and talked about it beforehand, that could make a difficult decision easier, if it should come.” 

    For the Abrahams, that heartbreakingly difficult decision has led to an inspiring friendship and a miraculous fact: Although Matt died 20 years ago, his heart continues beating today in a young mother's chest. 

When Melinda talks about organ donation, she talks about Katy and the goodness that can come from such a gift. And then she asks the same question she's been asking for the last 20 years, "How could anyone not do this?"