According to Donate Life Kansas, one person can save up to eight lives and improve up to 50 through organ and tissue donation.

As a mother whose son died following a motorcycle accident, Sharon Hull has lived through the indescribable emotions of a parent who can’t do anything more to save her child.

In that moment, she said, the stress could render you incapable of making a decision that could save many other people’s lives if you haven’t discussed it beforehand.

Shawn was a 17-year-old junior at Lawrence High School when he was riding on the back of a motorcycle when it rear-ended a car, throwing him 85 feet down the highway, his mother said. That was Oct. 6, 1989, and by the next day it was evident that he couldn’t be saved.

Thanks to a previous conversation at the dinner table, however, Hull knew immediately that she wanted her son’s organs to be donated.

“When we got to the hospital, I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I have no idea what’s happening, but don’t do anything that will keep us from donating organs if that’s what we come to,'” she said.

Because of that decision, the then-56-year-old man who received Shawn’s heart is alive and well after 26 years, and Hull described him as “just a wonderful person.”

“He’s had a really great life with (the heart),” Hull said.

One of Shawn’s kidneys went to a grandmother who was then able to get her grandson into a good school and on the right track to go to college, Hull said.

“She died after three years, but she got a lot done for her grandson in that three years,” Hull said.

It’s a decision no one wants to make, Hull said, but donating has given her family the only positive to come from the situation.

“If I had a choice, my son would have his organs, but that wasn’t my choice to make,” she said. “The next best one I could make was to let somebody else use them, because they weren’t going to do him any good.”

This is why Hull believes it’s important to have these discussions early.

“I just think you have to have pre-knowledge and pre-thinking about it or you just can’t make that decision after all that stress,” she said.

There are countless similar stories of donors and recipients — according to Belinda Rehmer, communications coordinator and social media manager at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, 456 lives were touched in 2015 because of eight tissue donors and 28 cornea donors at LMH alone — and some of them will be shared at a panel this week.

LMH, the Midwest Transplant Network and Saving Sight will host a discussion with a panel of donors and recipients from 9 to 11 a.m. Thursday in the Lawrence Public Library auditorium, 707 Vermont St. Afterward there will be an informational booth display with representatives available to answer questions and register anyone interested until 2 p.m. At 12:30, LMH CEO Gene Meyer will turn the fountain in the library atrium green for organ donation awareness.

You can also register to be a donor at yestheywantme.com. According to Donate Life Kansas, one person can save up to eight lives and improve up to 50 through organ and tissue donation.