James Brown '65, Beth Brown '88

What do you give a father who has everything? Beth Brown, the third of James Brown's seven children, may have Father's Day taken care of for the next 20 years. In December 2002, Beth gave her dad 65 percent of her liver, removing him from the list of approximately 18,000 people awaiting liver donation from a cadaver.

It was a big decision but not a terribly difficult one, according to the New Jersey alum. After graduating from Saint Anselm, she earned a master's degree in nursing and worked as a nurse practitioner at East Orange General Hospital. Knowing how ill her father would become if he did not receive a transplant, she volunteered for blood tests and CAT scans to determine if she qualified to donate.

"We weren't sure if my liver would be big enough, since I'm quite a bit smaller than my father," Beth said. After six weeks of testing, she was relieved when surgery was finally scheduled. "My father and I were both as cool as a cucumber, but my mother was a different story," she recalls.

Surgery took place at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., where several Saint Anselm College nursing grads were involved in the Browns' care. According to Jim, who had missed his 40th reunion the year before due to his illness, it was like having a reunion right in the hospital room.

"I felt fantastic the moment I had Beth's liver," Jim says. Three weeks after the transplant, James's liver had regenerated to full size. He's happy to have a new lease on life, and grateful to his daughter. There were a lot of tears when she made her decision to donate, he says: "Words just don't do it sometimes." The experience was long and difficult, according to Beth (whose liver still has some growing to do), "but it was totally worth it."

Father and daughter have always been close; they share the same alma mater and the same teasing sense of humor, and love to argue about Notre Dame football. "It's kind of weird when I think that my liver is inside him," Beth says, "but when you think about it, he'd already given it to me. I was just giving it back." Now, they share another activity: volunteering to give talks and distribute information encouraging people to become organ donors.