The donor for a very unusual transplant.
From Marinda Snow RighterCheryl Denelli Righter in Colorado, 1978.
On Feb. 12, while making breakfast, Cheryl Denelli Righter had a massive stroke. She was rushed to the University of
Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester and placed on life support. Hospital staff members noted her status as an organ donor and alerted the New England Organ Bank, which sent someone to meet with Righter’s daughter, Marinda. During a long night in the hospital, in the company of her boyfriend and her aunt, Marinda filled out transplant-authorization forms in the event of her mother’s death.
The next morning, Righter was declared brain-dead. Daniel Miller-Dempsey, family-services coordinator for the organ bank, helped Marinda come to terms with the fact that though her mother’s skin was warm and her chest rose and fell with artificial breaths, she was actually dead and that the machinery was just keeping her organs oxygenated until transplant surgeons could retrieve them. He offered to help her make some keepsakes: a clay mold of Righter’s hand, a lock of her light brown hair, a printout of her heartbeat on an EKG strip to be rolled up and put into a small glass vial.
By the late evening of Feb. 13, Marinda and her aunt, Donna Denelli-Hess, had said their goodbyes and headed home. But around midnight Marinda got a call from her aunt. She’d just spoken to Miller-Dempsey, who explained that Marinda’s mother was a possible match (the right age, sex, blood type and skin tone) for a highly unusual sort of transplant. There was a 45-year-old woman living in rural Vermont who was on the waiting list for a new face.
Marinda said she knew instantly that her mother would have agreed to the face transplant. She was a kind and generous person who worked with special-needs students at Mount Greylock Regional, the Williamstown, Mass., high school from which she herself graduated in 1975. “My God, what a legacy to leave,” Marinda said. But she wondered whether the recipient would look like her mother; she was assured she would not.
By 1:30 a.m., Carmen Blandin Tarleton, who was brutally disfigured in 2007 when her estranged husband attacked her with lye, was en route to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Soon Righter’s face arrived from Worcester, and by 5 a.m., the 30-member transplant team, under the direction of Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, began the painstaking 15-hour transfer of the smooth skin of Cheryl Righter’s pretty face onto Carmen Tarleton’s damaged one.
Two months later, Marinda met Tarleton, her face still puffy and almost immobile. She looked nothing like her mother, yet somehow it felt like seeing her again. At one point, she said, Carmen showed her a “little mole on her face, and I said: ‘Yes, I know that. I know that mole. Oh, my goodness, I know that freckle.’”
Correction: January 2, 2014 An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of Mount Greylock Regional High School. It is in Williamstown, Mass., not North Adams.
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