Durban - If you need a quiet spot to replenish your soul, the Circle of Life Memorial Garden in the Durban Botanic Gardens is the place for you.
Infused with art and colour and surrounded by lush vegetation, the special section has been created to honour those who have given life or changed lives through organ and tissue donation.
Janet Legemaate, the driving force behind the project, said: “The whole idea behind this garden is not to make it a sad, unhappy place, but a place for parents who have lost someone or recipients who want to just sit and reflect on the fact that they’ve received this extra gift of life.”
This year, the project, which was started in 2021 through the Legemaate family’s Hero777 Foundation, has been assisted by students from Action in Autism, while the Lenmed hospital group has also been involved.
Initially, a steel butterfly almost two metres high and three intertwined circles were placed in the garden, together with about 250 rocks named and dated in honour of the donors.
Now another circle, more painted rocks and a brick and cement bench, which has been mosaicked by four students from Action in Autism and looks like a lounge suite, has been added.
“I didn’t just want someone to come and do (mosaic) it. I wanted it to have meaning, and in this case, it has given meaning to those children. They’ve done something wonderful in a public space, and I’m hoping it will generate more work for them. Youngsters with autism don’t easily find employment,” said Legemaate.
She said the Circle of Life Memorial Garden was a place where people went to sit and pray. Some did yoga while others placed flowers there. “Everybody goes there. The point was to make it an uplifting place.”
Legemaate’s son Matthew was born with a congenital heart defect, which resulted in five open heart surgeries before he was ten. She said by the time he was 13, the doctors put him on oxygen and told her they couldn't operate anymore because it would probably kill him.
Legemaate said Matthew needed a heart and a lung transplant, but it was another seven years before this took place.
“He had already reconciled himself with passing away and had made the decision in July that year that we needed to register 50 000 people in his memory and that he wanted to donate all his organs.”
Then, one Sunday night, they received a phone call that would change his destiny because a donor had been found. “Afterwards, when he finally came home from hospital, he just couldn’t get over the whole thing about his donor being so special to him, having given him this chance he never had.”
She said, three months after that, he planted the first rose, called Memoir, in honour of his donor.
Since then, the family has worked tirelessly to encourage people to become organ donors and honour those who made the sacrifice to give others a lease on life.
Lenmed eThekwini Hospital and Heart Centre transplant manager Cindy Goldie said from painting rocks to ensuring that the donor lists were updated, transplant coordinators from various organisations were involved in different aspects of the project.
Goldie, who is also a heart and lung transplant coordinator, said: ”Without the kindness of a stranger, we wouldn’t be doing transplants.”
She urged people not to exclude themselves from becoming donors because of age or illness but to have the conversation with their family so they knew they would like to be donors and save lives.
“Each one is taken at its merit at the time; don’t think that because you have bad eyesight or because you are old that you can’t be a donor. We can use bone up to 85 years old and liver up to 90 and a cornea up to any age if there’s an emergency.”
Goldie said even those with autoimmune conditions could be placed on the donor list, while patients who were HIV positive could be donors for others with the same condition.
She encouraged readers to sign up as donors through www.hero777.co.za or on the Organ Donor Foundation website, www.odf.org.za