With all the other national awareness campaigns going on in April — from autism to alcohol — it would be easy to miss one of the most significant, wide reaching and long lasting:

This is National Donate Life Month.

While there are, literally, millions of Americans who can speak first-hand about organ or tissue donation, I doubt anyone in this country knows more about the myriad experiences of transplant recipients and donor families than does Reg Green.

He knows because he and his wife are the parents of a donor and because he has spent nearly the past 14 years collecting stories of recipients and donors from all over the world.

I have written about Reg and Maggie Green many times since their story made headlines in September 1994. While vacationing in Italy with their two young children, the California couple’s rented car was mistaken for a jewelry courier’s and fired upon by gun-wielding highway bandits.

Sleeping in the back seat were Eleanor, 4, and Nicholas, 7. Eleanor was unscathed, but a bullet pierced the back of Nicholas’ skull and severely damaged his brain. He never regained consciousness.

To the astonishment of Italians, most Europeans and many people in the United States, the Greens chose to donate Nicholas’ organs to gravely ill Italian patients. All seven of them are still alive.

In his grief, Reg Green, a former newspaper reporter, turned for some comfort to his journalist’s tendencies for inquiry and organization. Wherever he and Maggie went to receive another award or honor in Nicholas’ name, Reg took notes, gathered contacts and expanded his storehouse of organ transplant data and anecdotes.