Welcome back to Christmas, and a blog a day for these 12 days. (No partridges involved.)
There will be a few guest blogs from good friends of Live Loudly Donate Proudly and, sprinkled around them, a liberal helping of tunes.
The season is littered with Christmas playlists and favourite films to binge on (or avoid!), so we thought we’d extend the idea a bit. In our commitment to encouraging those conversations about organ donation, we’ve invited a bunch of friends from the transplant world to contribute a song or piece of music that has become part of their own journey’s soundtrack. We were surprised (shouldn’t have been) by the responses that came so readily, and that provide a window onto some deeply personal and intimate experiences.
Many tracks are familiar, although to link them with these personal journeys may be to hear them in a completely new way. Our tastes vary, but in all this music there is an invitation to visit a different place, even for a few minutes, and “sit with” those who give us their music, and sense a little more of the hopes and fears, joys and dreams that come with it.
We also wondered how best to share these tracks. Never easy for the non-IT skilled…and since people use all sorts of different music platforms we gave up scratching our heads and suggest you take the titles suggested, find them on your own chosen platform, and start building a Live Loudly Donate Proudly 12 days of Christmas playlist…
To start us off, here are a couple of tracks that helped bring organ donation to mind in a public way in recent years. The first video released with Lewis Capaldi’s song, “Someone you loved”, featured his relative, Peter Capaldi, as a man who visits the family of a woman to whom his wife’s heart was donated. It was released in partnership with the organ donation campaign group, Live Life, Give Life. The second version of the video focused on friendships and family, and, as Capaldi said, “…the people we surround ourselves with that have the strength when we don’t and help us continue to make the right decisions in moments of fear or hardship.”
Then, in a different genre, a song from Bonnie Raitt, “Just Like That”, inspired by a similar news story she saw about a woman who donated her son’s organs after he died, and who then met the man who received her son’s heart.
And, if you are still hungry for Christmas films, and don’t mind a spoiler…there is a story wrapped around the Wham track, “Last Christmas”, in a film of the same name. Critics criticised it, audiences loved it. You choose.
Whatever you do with these blogs, may there be kindness for you in the best of this season…