Grief and joy - only a heartbeat away at Australian wedding

SYDNEY - Oliver Zammit, scheduled to be best man at an Australian wedding next month, expects to hand over the rings in a Sydney church knowing that his son’s heart is beating inside the bridegroom beside him, news reports said Wednesday.

Zammit’s son, Doujon, was 20 when his life support was turned off in an Athens hospital last year. On holiday in Greece, he was critically injured in an assault at a night club.

Doujon’s heart was transplanted into Kostas Gribilas, who had just married his Australian sweetheart in an Athens registry office because he was too weak to manage a church ceremony and thought his death from heart-failure was imminent.

Gribilas moved to Greece when he was 10 but had returned frequently, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported.

It is very rare for the families of donors and recipients to learn each other’s identity - and rarer still, because of the circumstances of their meeting, for them to become good friends.

But that happened to Zammit and Gribilas, the latter choosing as his best man the father of the man whose death inadvertently gave him life.

“Today I live because Doujon was an organ donor,” Gribilas was quoted as saying. “I owe the parents of Doujon not one thank you but 1,000.”

A church wedding was what Gribilas and his wife, Poppy, had always wanted. Now, his return to health means the couple can exchange vows in storybook style.