When Brandy went on her first date with Tyson in 2015, she wasn’t interested in anything serious. “I was just looking for someone to hang out with,” she said. But it didn’t take long for her to fall in love with the avid outdoorsman. They eventually married i
n 2022. “He was a complete part of my daughters’ lives,” she said. “They were nine and seven when they first met him. He taught them to ski and snowboard.” Life was good.
On a Friday in August 2023, Brandy was in Jacksonville, Florida visiting her mother who was being treated for cancer. She talked to Tyson around 10 a.m. Four hours later, her life became a blur of shock and confusion. Tyson worked as a tree trimmer. “A limb came down and hit him so forcefully that it cracked his hard hat,” Brandy said. “Different parts of his spine were broken, and it sent him into cardiac arrest.” While anxiously waiting for her flight back to Knoxville, Brandy received a call. “My heart just dropped. The doctor said Tyson had a heartbeat and nothing else,” she said. “I knew what he was saying, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
Once Brandy joined her family and friends who’d gathered at UT Medical Center, a nurse escorted her into Tyson’s room and told her to take all the time she needed. “The nurses were all so kind to us and were making sure that I was taken care of,” she said. After a while, as Brandy sat holding his hand, a representative from Tennessee Donor Services entered and asked if Tyson was an organ donor because it wasn’t listed on his driver’s license. “I said ‘yes, of course,’ because we had talked about these things,” she said. “He would have been the first to say ‘use anything and everything you can.’”
Honoring Tyson’s wish to donate his organs was a decision that started Brandy’s healing process. “It turned everything around in my soul,” she said. “Everything I experienced that day up until that moment had felt like such trauma.”
A friend later said that a strong, new person emerged from the room after that, as Brandy announced to the small crowd that Tyson would be an organ donor. Tyson’s liver went to a man in North Carolina. An Indiana man got one kidney, and a Georgia woman the other. Tyson’s heart was flown to a patient at the same hospital in Jacksonville where, coincidentally, Brandy had been visiting her mom earlier that day.
Tyson was 54 when a fluke accident ended his life, and Brandy’s grief is tempered by his lifesaving gifts. “It’s not just about the organ recipients,” she said. “Yes, they’re getting an extended life, but the recipients’ families are getting an extension, too. They’re getting more life with their loved one.”
Thanks for sharing your touching, yet hopeful story, Brandy. UT Medical Center is home to East Tennessee’s only kidney transplant program. The program has given thousands of patients hope and longer lives since its inception in 1985, and its patients receive the most advanced methods of diagnosis, treatment, support and rehabilitation for kidney diseases and conditions. To learn more about becoming an organ donor, visit DonateLifeTn.org or call 1-877-552-5050.