Family honors son’s legacy at 20th annual Race for Life, raising organ donation awareness

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCIV) — Saturday morning, Folly Beach will host the 20th annual Race for Life, an event aimed to bring awareness to life saving organ donation.

One family has participated in the event for 18 years, seeing it as not only an event and opportunity to raise awareness, but also another way to remember their loved one who saved lives.

“We’ve been in 18 of the 20 races,” said George Sawyer. “We did not know about the first two years for some reason, or we were doing something else and didn’t make the first two races.”

Sawyer is the father of Patrick Sawyer, who died in 1987 after being hit by an SUV while riding his bike to school. Patrick was just 12 years old.

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Sawyer says around the time he lost his son, organ donation was still considered experimental.

“People just didn’t understand the significance of this.”

But through his involvement with the red cross and as a biology professor, he knew organ and tissue donation was saving lives, and insisted his son become one after the accident.

“I was aware by this time that his organs and tissues were no longer going to do him any good and could possibly help save lives. And that was important to us, and it was a family decision,” he explained.

It was the day of his son’s funeral when he got the confirmation that his son had in fact saved lives.

“Two ladies came to me at the funeral and said, ‘you’ll be happy to know that one of your son’s kidneys is on the way to Charleston and one is on the way to the upstate.’”

Sawyer remembers when he heard this, though it doesn’t diminish the loss of his son, it made the family feel better.

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However, Sawyer mentioned they don’t know who has Patrick’s organs because of very little information being transferred when they became a donor family.

“We probably couldn’t even if we had to try to find out who they were,” he added.

Though Sawyer and his family believed in organ donation, he said, at the time, because of the stigma surrounding organ donation, his family wasn’t even supposed to discuss the fact they were a donor family.

“It was two or three years later when we were finally beginning to talk about it in public, and we let people know that we were indeed were a donor family.”

One thing Sawyer hopes people take away from his family’s story is the value of being an organ donor.

“When this event occurred in Hartsville, it became a community event. It was just unbelievable the impact that it had on the Hartsville community,” he said.

And for people who may still be on the fence about becoming an organ donor, Sawyer says, “do it”.

Sawyer says eight family members will participate on their team this year, and one of the things he says they are looking forward to tomorrow is the camaraderie the event brings and being together as a family.

The 20th annual Race for Life starts at 8 a.m. Saturday morning in Folly Beach.