awareness
A person, living or dead, who provides an organ is called a donor. The person into whom the organ will be transplanted is the recipient. Collecting an organ from a donor is known as retrieval or procurement.
Almost anyone of nearly any age and average health can donate an organ. Anyone who has cancer, HIV or disease-causing bacteria in the bloodstream or body tissues is exempt from donation. Decisions about an organ's usability are made at the donor's time of death or, in the case of living donors, in the process leading to donation.
Most religious and spiritual groups either strongly endorse the act of donating organs or believe it's up to the donor to decide. Only a very few -- namely gypsies and Shinto -- are opposed to organ donation. (Gypsies do not have a formalized religion but do have a shared belief system in which the body is still needed in the first year of the afterlife as the soul retraces its steps.) The Amish support organ donation if there's a relative certainty of success for the recipient, but they're more reluctant if the probable outcome is questionable. Jehovah's Witnesses are not opposed to organ donation or transplantation, so long as the organs are first emptied of all blood [source: Transplant for Life].
So how can you become an organ donor? And what organs you can donate before you give up the ghost? We'll find out next.