A Boy Joins His Heroes
A garden with one of the loveliest views in Greece has been dedicated to Nicholas by the Hellenic College of Nephrology. It stands dramatically on the edge of a soaring hill overlooking the city and bay of Volos, the port from which the Argonauts set sail to find the golden fleece.
It is a perfect setting for a little boy who thrilled to the classical myths. (When I read him the story of the blinded Polyphemus running his hands in a rage through the woolly coating of his sheep trying to find Ulysses and his men who were clinging underneath, I thought he would burst.) The garden joins the 112 schools, squares, streets, parks - and one bridge - named for him in Italy. The college president, Dr. Georgios Efstratiadis and his board see the garden as a way to remind all who go there of the tens of thousands of kidney patients whose lives were saved by a transplant.
I am taking this opportunity to thank everyone else involved, including the friendly management and staff of the Xenia Palace hotel in Portaria, on whose grounds the garden stands, and to Dr. Athanasios Diamandopoulos, a former president of the college and Professor Natale De Santo, professor emeritus at Second University of Naples, who together spearheaded this project.
The garden adds another timeless element to Nicholas' story, who died in a hospital overlooking the Straits of Messina, where thousands of years ago Ulysses, again in the kind of fearful danger that puts young boys on the edge of their seats, navigated his ship through the narrow channel between Scylla, the monstrous rock and Charybdis, the monstrous whirlpool.
Here is a link to a beautiful video made by Giusy De Rosa, a schoolteacher in Caserta, Italy, of cities with “Nicholas’ places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKtm2CQP8tg
This is my son, seven-year old Nicholas Green, of Bodega Bay, California, who was shot in an attempted carjacking in Italy while we were driving on the main road south from Naples on a family vacation. My wife, Maggie, and I donated his organs and corneas, which went to seven very sick Italians, four them teenagers. Two of the seven were going blind, all the others could have died at any time. In the next ten years, organ donation rates in Italy, which were then just about the lowest in Europe, tripled – a rate of increase no other country came close to – so that thousands of people are alive who would have died. All around the world his story brought people’s attention to the acute shortage of donated organs and became known as ‘The Nicholas Effect.’