Smith: 20 years after Nicholas died, so many are saved

You couldn’t fault Reg Green were he inclined to prefer to visit hell or the surface of an asteroid before he’d step ever again into Italy.

But that’s a million light years from how the former Bodega Bay resident feels 20 years after his shining light of a 7-year-old, Nicholas, was shot by highway robbers during a family vacation.

Reg right now is in Italy. His anniversary pilgrimage is national news there, a major event.

He’s in the country to help dedicate a park in Rome to Nicholas, and also a plaque that bears the boy’s name and will stand for perpetuity at a cemetery in historic Cassino, the site 70 years ago of one of the most monstrously deadly battles of World War II.

Reg, who’s 85, also is visiting with many common and influential Italians, including the president of Calabria. That’s the region at the toe of Italy’s boot, where Nicholas was mortally wounded on Sept. 29, 1994. His father is stopping, too, at some of the 103 places throughout Italy - schools, parks, squares, bridges - that bear Nicholas Green’s name.

REG EMAILED from Italy, “The response to the 20th anniversary is even bigger than I expected, much bigger.”

Many Italians are simultaneously sickened by what happened to Nicholas in their country, and elated by happened in their country afterward. You may not need to be reminded of the chain of events, but just in case:

Late on a Thursday night, Reg was driving a rental car on a highway near Cantanzaro. Maggie sat beside him and asleep in the backseat were Nicholas, who’d just turned 7, and his 4-year-old sister, Eleanor.

A car pulled up alongside and the men inside shouted and motioned for Reg to pull over. Fearing for his family’s safety, he accelerated. The strangers caught up, then there was a blast and a rear passenger window shattered.

Reg hit the gas and managed to lose the strangers, later to be revealed - and tried, and convicted - of being robbers who thought they were heisting the car of a jewelry dealer.

When Reg pulled to a stop, it appeared at first that his children had slept through the terror. But then he and Maggie noticed that Nicholas’ tongue was sticking out of his mouth and there was a bit of vomit on his chin.

A bullet had struck him in the head. He was declared brain dead at a hospital two days later.

Then his parents did something that changed the world. They made the anguished, loving decision to donate their son’s organs.

A YOUNG WOMAN on the edge of death received Nicholas’ liver. Six other Italians had their health or vision restored through transplants of the heart, kidneys, pancreas and corneas.

Those life-saving or -altering gifts touched people profoundly up and down Italy, historically a country in which organ donation was taboo and rare, and far beyond. As the story of Nicholas Green and his family spread around the world, helped along by international news coverage, then a book by Reg Green - “The Nicholas Effect” - and a movie, “Nicholas’ Gift,” that starred Jamie Lee Curtis, attitudes about donating the organs of a stricken loved one or registering oneself as a potential donor changed.

THE TRANSFORMATION has been most dramatic in Italy. Reg Green, who’s dedicated the past two decades of his life to championing the cause of organ donation, watched as donation rates in Italy tripled through the first 10 years after Nicholas’ death.

Those rates remain high, but they’ve leveled off. Though the legacy of the boy buried at the Bodega cemetery continues to inspire organ donation in Italy and around the world, there continues to be legions people who suffer while they wait and hope for an organ transplant.

Reg Green finds it nearly too tragic for words that every day in America alone, 18 people on organ transplant waiting lists die.

That’s why he’s in Italy today. That’s why he’ll never stop talking about Nicholas and urging that what he and Maggie did for seven ailing Italians 20 years ago is human and natural, and needs to be universal.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.