‘The best gift’: Family of Santa Rosa native who died after crash donates his organs

Kirk Brandt was generous to a fault, and generous to the end.

Brandt, a 2002 graduate of Cardinal Newman High School, died minutes after doctors at the UC Davis Medical Center removed him from life support on Oct. 29. The 38-year-old had been gravely injured in a car accident in Lake County 11 days earlier.

Friends and family gathering at noon on Dec. 28 for a celebration of his life at Resurrection Catholic Church on Stony Point Road will remark on his easy laugh, his knack for storytelling and the headlong way he pursued his passions.

“Whatever Kirk got into” — running, veganism, jumping rope, exploring his Irish heritage — “he REALLY got into,” said his sister Mariah.

They’ll recall how much he loved his niece and nephew, and compliment his gift for languages. He spoke fine Spanish and recently taught himself Gaelic, even though, as Mariah noted, “nobody else spoke Gaelic.”

“He drove us all crazy,” said his mother, Maureen Minto, smiling through tears.

But his signal virtue, the trait to which mourners will repeatedly return, is Brandt’s selflessness, his deep generosity. That noble quality -- doubly relevant during this Christmas season of giving -- reminded Maureen of St. Francis of Assisi.

As a high school junior, moved by the plight of a boy he’d never met — a 16-year-old whose homeless mother couldn’t afford to buy him clothes — Brandt organized a countywide drive that brought in more than 5,000 articles of clothing.

“He was willing to give the shirt off his back — even when he really needed that shirt,” said his sister Alexa.

For the last decade of his life, Brandt helped a Fijian family he’d met while attending a Tony Robbins seminar there, sending money if they needed a new boat, for instance. The couple ended up naming a son after him.

“Sometimes it was hard for us to understand why he would give the thing he needed himself,” recalled Mariah. “But he just cared deeply, and wanted to do things for others — without acknowledgment, really.”

In the final moments of his life, there was no escaping that acknowledgment.

Walk of Honor

Informed by doctors that Kirk had suffered irreversible brain damage and would never regain consciousness, his family made the decision to remove him from life support and donate his organs. It’s what he would have wanted, they are certain.

And so, at 6 o’clock on a Saturday morning, after family members took turns saying their goodbyes, and a Catholic priest performed the sacrament anointing the sick, a bagpipe rendition of “Amazing Grace” was played as Brandt was rolled down a long corridor to the room where his breathing tube would be removed.

Lining the hallway, standing silently at attention, were about 60 people: administrative staff, nurses, doctors and housekeepers. It is a tradition at this medical center and elsewhere for hospital employees to pay their respects — to honor and thank the donor and their families for this final gift.

In a brief video of Kirk’s “Walk of Honor,” Maureen is flanked by Alexa and Jason, the oldest sibling. Behind them is Mariah, who is instructed at one point to put her hands on Maureen’s shoulders. Just a minute, her daughter replies. “I’m trying to get rid of my Kleenex.”

Behind them, Kirk’s godmother, Linda Gray, could be heard whispering “Thank you,” to each of the workers lining the corridor

“I don’t think we knew exactly what to expect,” recalled Alexa. “But I’d say all of us were pretty much blown away.”

The knowledge that Kirk would, in dying, save lives, transformed his family’s outlook.

“We couldn’t get him back,” said Mariah. “But donating his organs really gave us something to hold onto, the feeling that something good could come out of this tragedy.”

Acute need for organs

While arriving at the beautiful, terrible decision to take their son and brother off life support, they were guided by staff members of the Sierra Donor Services, which partners with the UC Davis Medical Center to facilitate organ, eye and tissue donations.

“We’re meeting with families that are, unfortunately, in a period of acute grief and loss,” said Sean Van Slyck, executive director of the donor project, which worked with 164 donors in 2021 to facilitate 407 organ transplants and more than 13,000 tissue grafts for transplant.

The need is acute: More than 20,000 people in California are waiting for transplants. Nationwide, that number is 107,000. Every day in this country, said Van Slyck, 20 people die while awaiting a new organ.

It looked like Jim Siler of Livonia, Georgia, might end up being one of those casualties. Siler, 69, had spent four years on the list for a new kidney. He was in the end stages of renal disease.

On Oct. 27, his wife, Nan, got a call from a friend. She was in a work meeting, and couldn’t pick up.

“You need to talk to me,” he texted. “I may have a kidney for you.”

When she called, the man explained that he had “a friend, who’s got a friend, and that family has to make a horrible decision. But they’re looking for people who are waiting” for transplants.

“So, we were able to get Jim’s information to the [Brandt] family,” Nan Siler recalled.

Colorful character

In the days after Kirk’s accident, family members made their way to Sacramento’s UC Davis Medical Center. There, Kirk lay comatose, intubated and attended by six teams of doctors, including a trauma team, an ER team, an optic team and neurosurgery team.

First to arrive were Kirk’s aunt Marge and her wife, Linda Gray. Maureen drove from Santa Rosa; Piner High School and UCLA graduates Alexa and Mariah flew up from Los Angeles. Alexa is a marketing executive at American Express, Mariah a partner at a global law firm.

Their brother Jason, a Naval Academy graduate, flew in from Virginia Beach, where he is a commander in the Navy.

While his siblings were more accomplished professionally, Kirk was the most colorful member of his family, which included his stepfather Dan, and two step siblings, one of whom preceded him in death. After launching that successful clothing drive — a project that helped him earn the rank of Eagle Scout — Kirk wrote an essay about the experience that was included in the anthology, “Chicken Soup For the Preteen Soul 2.”

Supremely fit and health conscious, he’d taken up jump-roping in recent years, and logged a personal best, he said, of 900 rope skips without stopping.

In a tribute left below Kirk Brandt’s online obituary, a former track and field teammate, Bart Farrell, recalled him as a person of unrivaled “authenticity” who would keep running intervals even after practice was over.

“He ran until he injured himself, and then would still keep running, not just with his body, but with his heart.”

A friend who goes by the name of Chef BeLive recalled the many “incredible elevating spiritual and plain out-of-this world experiences,” he shared with Kirk, who had been called, Chef speculated, to a plain “beyond human life” to “share his energy in a way beyond our comprehension!”

Another family friend recalled a “beautiful child” whose subsequent “struggles” in life were “heartbreaking.”

No answers

Standing sentinel at the front door of his mother’s northwest Santa Rosa home is a statue of the Virgin Mary, just a few feet from a smiling Buddha. Inside are Celtic crosses, rosaries and pictures of saints.

When a visitor observed that it felt like a spiritual space, she replied, “Well, when you have four little kids and get a divorce, you do a lot of praying.”

Kirk was 3 when his parents split up and 17 when his father died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm, “just like (actor-comedian) John Ritter,” said Maureen.

Her ex, Kent Brandt, had been a San Francisco firefighter. “This was Kirk’s most prized possession,” she said, motioning to a handsome, heavy jacket draped over a chair. It was the turnout coat his “Pops” would put on before fighting a blaze.

While it rocked the worlds of all the Brandt kids, their father’s death was particularly rough on Kirk, who was just beginning to battle some other troubling headwinds. From early adulthood, he lived with the challenges of bipolar disorder, said Alexa, who recalled that “his moods were strong, and he tended to be impulsive.”

A simple task “for the average person,” she said, could be “a frustrating and challenging maze for Kirk.” Friends and family “saw him apply constant, valiant effort, along with his high intelligence, to pursue his lofty goals, but life was so tough for him.”

He worked with a company that sold natural foods, then later in a grocery store.

“He wanted to be a successful entrepreneur so badly,” recalled Mariah. “He had so many ideas, and a lot of charisma, but not the business aptitude,” or experience.

Kirk’s mental health challenges “were probably the biggest barrier to his success,” she said, her voice cracking. “But at the end of the day, you would just love this person so much.”

On Oct. 18, according to the California Highway Patrol incident report that was made available to the family nearly two months after Kirk’s accident, he was in the passenger seat of a vehicle traveling in Lake County. At one point he became emotional, then “exited the vehicle,” despite the driver’s attempt to prevent him from doing so.

In a statement released on behalf of the family, Alexa wrote:

“Kirk was like a cat who felt he had many lives. He named himself ‘Lucky Leprechaun’ with family, for his Irish heritage and ability to miraculously endure through challenges.

“Kirk was a complex person who could be incredibly charitable, but also a risk taker. On a previous occasion, he had impulsively exited a moving vehicle without injury due to his athletic ability, and his family believes that he felt he could be safe this time, too.

“So much is unclear and unknown about Kirk’s rationale for exiting the moving vehicle. We just feel that Kirk really miscalculated the grave risk of his actions. Whatever his impulse or emotion was … we are left without answers.”

Matching organs to recipients

Paramedics responding to the accident called for a helicopter, which ferried Brandt to UC Davis Medical Center, California’s only level 1 trauma center north of San Francisco. He’d been there five days when doctors informed the family that “Kirk’s brain was not going to recover,” recalled Maureen.

Staff members at Sierra Donor Services explained to the family the concept of directed donations: the donor, or the donor’s family, may designate transplants to specific recipients — usually a family member, friend or colleague.

Kirk’s family, recalled Alexa, “misunderstood this as: Let’s ask everyone we know” if they know someone who needs an organ. “And then we told people to forward it.”

Within six hours, they had a list of 28 people who needed organs. Specialists at Sierra Donor Services sprung into action, “evaluating” potential recipients, as Van Slyck put it, then “allocating” organs to recipients “locally and across the country.”

Three of those 28 ended up receiving Kirk’s organs. A fourth organ went to an anonymous recipient.

Kirk struggled briefly in the moments after he was taken off the ventilator. Maureen placed her hand on his forehead, then said “the biggest prayer of my life.” Almost immediately, her son stopped struggling. Minutes later, he passed.

Brandt’s body was immediately wheeled into a nearby operating room, a team of surgeons close behind.

Two hours later, from their room at a nearby Courtyard Marriott, the siblings saw one helicopter, then another, lift off from the roof of the hospital. They’re pretty sure those choppers carried Kirk’s organs. Jason shot some video of the birds taking off. In the background can be heard a recording of the song the Brandts were listening to in that moment: “On Eagle’s Wings.”

“His life is saved”

On the morning of Oct. 29, Jim Siler got the call he’d been waiting for. “Go to the hospital,” instructed the donation coordinator.

While Jim unhooked from his dialysis machine, Nan packed the car. It was 8 a.m. The Piedmont Atlanta Transplant Institute was two hours away, and they needed to get there between 10 and 11 a.m.

“I was frantic,” said Nan. “We called to say, ‘We’re on our way but it’s gonna take awhile.’ They said, ‘Your kidney’s not even here yet. You’re fine.”

After passing an endless battery of tests, Jim went into surgery Sunday morning, October 30.

The operation took 3½ hours, after which one of the doctors walked up to Nan, a smile on his face. “This is going to be great,” he told her. “This kidney is in such amazing shape. It’s the prettiest kidney ever.”

When those remarks were relayed to Maureen Minto, Kirk’s mother, she beamed and blinked back tears. “It was all those salads,” she said. “All that kale.”

Not quite two months after his surgery, Jim Siler has lost 50 pounds of water weight, thanks to the new kidney. He gets blood work done every week. “According to his results today,” Nan said on Dec. 20, “the kidney is functioning normally.

“His life is saved.”

While there’s still a “long road for him to get completely better,” she added, “it’s night and day. I never dreamed we’d really get to this point. It’s magic.”

The Silers grieve for the Brandt family. “I know for Jim to have this opportunity, they had to lose a loved one,” said Nan.

“But with this gift from Kirk and his family, this is the best Christmas ever. It’s the best gift we’ll ever receive in our lives.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.