In February 2009, my family was eight months into a global circumnavigation aboard our sailing yacht. We had called into a marina in Phuket, Thailand, and our daughter Ali was watching a huge superyacht tie up at a jetty. An error was made during the docking procedure, which caused a cleat to be torn out of the jetty and the heavy mooring rope to whiplash with extreme force. Ali suffered serious head injuries and was rushed to the Bangkok Hospital Phuket, where she was examined by neurosurgeons. That first night we were told there was no brain activity and no brain stem function, but as certain tests had to be carried out before she could be legally pronounced brain dead, we then waited for five days with her in the hospital before life support could be “turned off”.

Late on day four, the neurosurgeon told my husband and me that Ali had failed the final tests and would now be declared legally brain dead. He then asked — gently and with no urging — if we wished to consider organ donation. It was not something we had thought about. For four days we had stayed by Ali’s bedside, keeping shifts with the rest of our immediate family who had flown in from Australia, talking, singing, weeping, telling jokes, massaging her hands and feet, unable to lose that flickering of hope for a miracle. Organ donation was part of a step we hadn’t yet reached.

The doctor explained that, if we agreed to donation, the transplant team would arrive from Bangkok the next day — or whenever we were ready — and Ali would be taken to the operating theatre and the useful organs removed. She would be returned to us later in the week, and we were assured that she would look perfectly fine. The doctor also pointed out that he had nothing to do with the transplant team, that they were from a different hospital altogether, and that Ali’s organs would not be used in this hospital. We could also change our minds at any time, regardless of signing the document.

That sounded acceptable, and we signed. Without actually discussing it, each one of us assumed that we would sit with Ali while life support was disconnected and be with her as she stopped breathing, and that she would then be taken to theatre. Later that evening, the person in charge of organising the organ donation came to see us and explain how it would happen. Awkwardly, the woman explained to us that, no, we couldn’t sit with our precious child as she drew her last breath and her heart stopped its beating. For the organs to be in perfect transplant condition, they had to be removed from a body that was technically still functioning. She would be taken to theatre still attached to life support.

Our immediate response was one of horror and disbelief, and we told her that no one would be taking our child while she still had a heartbeat, that they would have to wait until she was dead. The woman, obviously feeling very awkward and uncomfortable, said that was fine, that was our prerogative, but the only organs that might then be able to be used would be the corneas, and not much else.

We spent the rest of the night in turmoil. Logically, we knew that our daughter was gone, that an exhaustive testing regime proving brain death meant she was dead. We understood the reasons why the procedure had to happen that way — that as soon as the heart stopped beating and oxygen stopped being delivered to the cells in the body, the organs would immediately begin to deteriorate. We also knew Ali would want her organs donated. She was the kind of kid who couldn’t walk past someone with his hand out or someone who looked upset. But the sudden reality of what her donation asked of us was unbearable.

Early the next morning, I phoned a doctor we knew in Australia. He confirmed that it was the correct procedure; that for the best possible transplant potential, the organs had to be removed from a body still attached to life support, with a beating heart supplying oxygen to the tissues. This was why organ donation was such a controversial issue.

We wanted to honour what we knew Ali’s wishes would have been, and we wanted the donation to be as useful and as beneficial as possible, to make the best possible gift on her behalf. But doing so meant that we had to absorb these confronting facts about organ donation at a time when we were overcome with grief.

I knew that none of us could walk away from her while she still seemed to be alive — her skin warm, her chest rising and falling, the machine beeping her pulse rate, all those signs you hang on to as proof of life even though you know it’s hopeless. I talked to the rest of the family and explained the procedural requirements. We had to accept — emotionally as well as rationally — that the only things keeping Ali’s heart beating and her chest rising were machines. We had to acknowledge that she was already gone. When the team was assembled, we would say our goodbyes and then call them in when we were ready to let Ali be taken from us.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, and it should not have happened that way. No family should have to face the shock of discovering these details for the first time at that point. I am an educated, widely read, well informed Australian woman and, then and still, a registered donor, but I knew nothing about the procedural requirements for organ donation. No one I have spoken to since, apart from doctors, has had any idea either. None of us had ever been in the situation where we needed to know.

Since returning to Australia, I have studied the Medicare leaflet about organ donation — the one that comes with your drivers licence renewal — and the new organ donation website (http://www.donatelife.gov.au). There was no mention anywhere of the emotional impact you might need to be prepared for, nothing that said:

If clear information was provided in advance about brain death, life support procedures and the requirements for organ removal, then at least we might have been a little more prepared. At some point in the past most of us would have talked about it, academically and dispassionately, but with further information we could have already considered the notion of “beating heart donation” and had the chance to consider the sacrifice the family of an organ donor is called upon to make.

It might be argued that in Australia we would have had these facts carefully and sensitively explained to us at the hospital. I am sure it also happens in Thailand, and certainly an effort was made to explain it to us, in spite of language barriers. However, the real point here is that the hospital bedside is not the place or the time to find out these facts for the first time.

If such information was available, then perhaps there might be more consent to organ donation at the hospital bedside. I never previously understood why a family would go against a potential donor’s signed consent. Now I can completely understand a family countermanding their child’s wishes when they discover at the last moment what it means — that they have to hand over their apparently still living child, and that they must give up the final solace of the survivor, of holding their loved one in their arms as they take their last breath. We are parents, sisters, brothers and children of the dead person. We are not all going to be rational and sensible at such a time.

Ali was a very healthy 16-year-old who had never had a serious illness. Her heart saved the life of a teenage girl in Bangkok a day later, and her other organs were used to save or improve the lives of six other people. I still believe in organ donation. But human beings often make decisions based on emotional responses. We are already facing the most unutterable grief when our children, our husbands or wives, our parents or siblings, are declared brain dead. Please, make people aware of everything involved in organ donation through the leaflets and websites, so that the ordinary person is better prepared, at least in some way, to deal with it if they’re unlucky enough to have to face it one day.