When Cindy Hanback answered the phone and heard her son Alex’s voice, she thought he just had a cold.
“I had missed his original phone call, so he left me a voicemail saying he loved me,” she recalled. “I immediately called him back and told him to go and lay down. He needed some sleep, because he had a cold. He just needed to get some rest.”
She didn’t know it would be the last time they would speak.
The next day, Cindy’s oldest son Michael called to tell her Alex was in the hospital and his medical team didn’t know if he would wake up. She found the first flight from her home in Arizona back to Michigan to be by his side.
By the time she arrived, Alex was in the ICU, unconscious, and soon declared brain dead due to a sudden brain aneurysm.
“After I knew that he had passed, and I started to have conversations with the Gift of Life team, I was like, now we have a common mission,” she said. “Because Alex loved to help people, now we were going to help Alex live on.”
Alex Closson, 23, had registered as an organ and tissue donor when he got his driver’s license—something he’d mentioned casually, and Cindy had nearly forgotten about it.
Over the next day and a half, Cindy stayed with her son. “The Gift of Life nurses, they weren’t just taking care of Alex, they were taking care of me,” she said. “It became a team mission to do absolutely everything we could to keep his organs viable and healthy and help as many people as possible.”
Thanks to Alex’s selfless decision, four lives were saved. He 
donated both kidneys, his heart and his lungs. Alex was also a tissue donor, potentially healing and improving the lives of countless others.
Cindy remembers her son as a joyful spirit, full of color, kindness, and life. “Alex should have been born in the 70s—he was a modern-day hippie,” she said.
She carries his memory with her forever thanks to a tattoo she worked with an artist to create. His memorial tattoo, a silhouette with upturned wings and a heartbeat from his EKG, captures his spirit. “The colors are representative of his hippie personality,” Cindy said. “The upturned wings just seemed positive to me.”
Through this experience, Cindy herself became a registered donor. “I went ahead and registered in honor of Alex,” she said. “I originally didn’t think I could be a donor due to my service in the Army. Having gone through the process, I know Gift of Life would be so thorough that they would know whether or not my organs would be used to help somebody. I’m just comfortable with that now.”
As a mother, Cindy’s grief is profound—but so is her gratitude. “If he wasn’t an organ donor, I don’t think I would be as well-off as I am today,” she said. “I miss him so much, but I know he is living on through others that will hopefully go on to do great things.”
The best way to save lives is by joining the Michigan Organ Donor Registry. To sign up, visit golm.org/signup.
