Contributed photo / Chris Hopkins lets the mother of his heart donor listen to her son’s heart. Laura Watson lost her son, Steven Kerr, in 2019, and his heart was used in Hopkins’ transplant.On the night before his 2019 heart transplant, while lying in a hospital bed in Nashville, Chris Hopkins couldn’t shake a troubling thought: For him to live, someone would have to die.
Hopkins, 65, a Chattanooga investment advisor and Chattanooga Times Free Press financial columnist, recalls thinking that a family somewhere was about to experience an unspeakable tragedy. Even though Hopkins knew he would not be responsible for his heart donor’s death, the scenario was still unsettling.
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“You think, ‘Some family is going to lose somebody, (and) it’s going to change their life forever,'” Hopkins said in an interview. “You cope with that.”