The donor-facing side of the South Texas Blood & Tissue Donor Pavilion is home to a garden not just belonging to the living.
The Legacy Garden it is a space where donor families can find connection between loss and legacy.
For 10 years, the Legacy Garden has been where hands are still mourned, names remembered, where tears are shed. A garden where grief takes root, blooming into hope.
Last Saturday, donor families came to refurbish their beloved space.
Families stepped forward with shovels in hand, turning the soil together. Some knelt to press roots into place. Others carefully positioned plaques, tracing names with their fingers before setting them down.
It was a series of small acts and quiet rituals. Some cried. Some closed their eyes. Others made a celebration of it. Everybody shared their experiences as they worked on beautifying the space.
Planting the oak
Trees play an important part in organ and tissue donation, representing the connections and support donation gives to donors, recipients and their families. Like trees growing and supporting each other in a forest, donation connects people in many ways.
An oak tree was planted in the garden, a tribute to this year’s Donate Life theme “Leave a Legacy.” Families and BBG staff gathered to pay tribute as donor families lovingly shoveled dirt on the beloved tree.
A single butterfly drifted through the space, slow and unhurried, weaving between families gathered in remembrance.
One woman cried as it passed, “I know they’re here with me,” she whispered.
The Heart of the Hope
At the heart of it all is Susan Smith. As senior manager of Bereavement events, her title does little to capture the true weight of her work.
Susan finds donor families during their worst times, guiding them through the journey of grief. She finds them where they are, standing beside them during to make sense of the unimaginable; helping them heal and share their stories.
Those stories find their way into the garden.
Like all works of art, the stories in the garden find themselves there in fragments. From the poignant silences to the laughter, the memories surfacing all at once.
Legacies planted
Ms. Sylvia Montemayor has been coming here since 2022.
She still calls him Mikey.
Michael Anthony Garcia III was her son. The kind, she says, who was always helping people. Always on the move, always giving.
His death was sudden. He was 36 years old.
“We didn’t even know he was a donor,” Sylvia said. “It wasn’t until after they took us into a room and told us, ‘Your son is a donor.’”
By the time the process was complete, Mikey had given life to four other people, and restored sight for two more.
Sylvia decorates Mikey’s spaces following the seasons. She looks for him in the world: in strangers, fleeting moments, signs she says come when she needs them most.
“I always ask him for signs, and he shows up,” she said. “I know he’s living though those other people he helped.”
Meanwhile, across the garden
But grief does not move in a straight line.
It bends. Messy. It fractures differently in every person it touches, as Susan can attest.
Not everybody’s grief journey is the same, as she always says.
In the same garden, just steps away, another story unfolds.
Rachel Garcia still visits every weekend. She was Mikey’s wife.
Where Sylvia speaks of signs, Rachel holds tightly to memory — the kind you can replay, moment by moment. Her eyes light up, as she remembered, mist, and that smiles that smile they used to share.
“He was the life of everything,” she said. “You had to meet him to know him.”
They met at work. Built a life on spontaneity, late-night drives, loud music, inside jokes that made no sense to anyone else.
“You know when you’re with someone for years, and you still get butterflies?” she said. “That was him.”
Even now, Rachel talks to Mikey. At home. At the cemetery. In the quiet moments that used to belong to both.
“I still go see him every weekend,” she said. “I talk to him like he’s right there.”
Their decision for the two of them to become donors had been simple. A question at the DMV. A glance between them.
“Why not?” she remembered. “We didn’t even think twice.”
It wasn’t a surprise, Rachel explained, that he gave in the end.
Rachel and Sylvia both agree. That was just who Mikey was.
“That’s just who he was. He helped everybody.”
Around the garden, their stories exist side by side. Not identical but rooted in love for the same person.
The same loss. The same love: Mikey.
Susan moves between them with quiet intention—not to reconcile, not to resolve, but to hold space and hold room for both ladies.
“Grief is not something to be fixed,” Susan said. “It is something to be carried.”
Ten years later, the Legacy Garden is still doing what it was built to do: Create hope, offer respite, and a quiet place to celebrate legacies.
Although grief is messy, families do not have to carry it alone. And when something as small as a butterfly passes through, it’s a reminder that maybe they are not as alone as they may think.
