Our mission: To promote organ and tissue donation among young people and the general population and to make our two departed children known and keep them alive.
On Thursday evening, January 2, 2020, our lives turned upside down. Catherine, my 17-year-old daughter, and Jérémy, her 17-year-old boyfriend, were killed in a car accident. Two wonderful people who had a great future ahead of them. Two people who were successful. Who were loved by all. Generous, unifying people who loved life and who lived it to the fullest. Kind people who were always there to help their families and many friends, and who will have done so until the very end. Caring souls, as they were called by someone. What a terrible drama their hasty departure was! Our lives were changed forever.
The departure of a child before its parents is absolutely not in the normal course of things. In order to survive this, you absolutely must find meaning in something that doesn't have any. We had heard about Chain of Life from Julie Grégoire, who was Catherine’s English teacher in her last year of secondary school. One day, when I wrote on social media that Catherine and Jérémy had donated their tissues to nearly 30 people, Julie told me that she was very moved by this because she had taught Catherine the Chain of Life unit in the fall of 2018. She said that I should share our story with this wonderful organization. What better way to raise awareness among young people than with a real story about young people? So I contacted Lucie Dumont, the founding president of Chain of Life. A beautiful relationship of respect and complicity began from that moment on.
Paule, Jérémy's mother, and I found a way to make sense of our tragedy. By promoting the cause of organ and tissue donation through the wonderful Chain of Life program, which aims to educate young people from 15 to 17 years of age about organ and tissue donation, so that they then become ambassadors of family discussion on this issue. Paule and I decided to invest our time and energy to help deploy this magnificent program in all secondary schools in Quebec and thus help save lives and improve the quality of life.
What gives meaning to life gives meaning to death.
Thus, our mission was twofold. Promote organ and tissue donation among young people, and by the same token among the general population through family discussion, and make our two departed children known and kept alive in everyone's memory.
We had found our mission! Our children would have been proud of us. They had both signed their cards and couldn't imagine why everyone else wouldn't do the same. Let's help make the world a better place, just as they did. What better way to pay tribute!
Sophie Thivierge
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