Acquisition of Donor Traits by Heart Transplant Recipients

Acquisition of Donor Traits by Heart Transplant Recipients

Excerpted with permission from Pearsall, P, Schwartz, G E R, and Russek, L G S (2002), Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients That Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors. Journal of Near-Death Studies 20 (3), © 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

Case 1 The donor was an 18-year-old boy killed in an automobile accident. The recipient was an 18-year-old-girl diagnosed with endocarditis and subsequent heart failure. The donor’s father, a psychiatrist, reported:

My son always wrote poetry. We had waited more than a year to clean out his room after he died. We found a book of poems he had never shown us, and we’ve never told anyone about them. One of them has left us shaken emotionally and spiritually. It spoke of his seeing his own sudden death. He was a musician too, and we found a song he titled “Danny, My Heart is Yours.” The words are about how my son felt he was destined to die and give his heart to someone. He had decided to donate his organs when he was 12 years old. We thought it was quite strong, but we thought they were talking about it in school. When we met his recipient, we were so . . . we didn’t know like what it was. We don’t know now. We just don’t know.

The recipient reported:

When they showed me pictures of their son, I knew him directly. I would have picked him out anywhere. He’s in me. I know he is in me and he is in love with me. He was always my lover, maybe in another time somewhere. How could he know years before he died that he would die and give his heart to me? How would he know my name is Danielle? And then, when they played me some of his music, I could finish the phrases of his songs. I could never play before, but after my transplant, I began to love music. I felt it in my heart. My heart had to play it. I told my mom I wanted to take guitar lessons, the same instrument Paul [the donor] had played. His song is in me. I feel it a lot at night and it’s like Paul is serenading me.

The recipient’s father reported:

My daughter, she was what you say . . . a hell raiser. Until she got sick, they say from a dentist they think, she was the wild one. Then, she became quite quiet. I think it was her illness, but she said she felt more energy, not less. She said she wanted to play an instru-ment and she wanted to sing. When she wrote her first song, she sang about her new heart as her lover’s heart. She said her lover had come to save her life

Given the ambiguity (between Survival & Super-Psi of what's going on in that first case, just wanted to give a quote from the second:

We stayed with the [recipient family] that night. In the middle of the night, Carter came in and asked to sleep with my husband and me. He cuddled up between us exactly like Jerry did, and we began to cry. Carter told us not to cry because Jerry said everything was okay. My husband and I, our parents, and those who really knew Jerry have no doubt. Our son’s heart contains much of our son and beats in Carter’s chest. On some level, our son is still alive.

Of course this isn't flat out a decider between the two, and of course something else can easily be happening, but it does mention communication between the recipient and donor in a more direct way.

It's intriguing stuff. Of the cases in that report, one of them mentioned the other angle, the recipient in case 9:

"I wonder where my old heart went, too. I sort of miss it. It was broken, but it took care of me for a while."

Given the reports, this might point to a significant loss of something, as well as a gain.

A personal anecdote with a few degrees of separation here... the father of the office manager where I work had a heart transplant. She said he was never the same after that and he and his wife struggled to get along afterwards.