Family Helps East Meadow Give the "Gift Of Life"

May 4.

It’s a date Denyse Kofod, Ed Ackerly, and other familiar faces of longtime residents of the East Meadow area hope will become an annual item on the community calendar. It's the birthday of Teresa Ackerly -- Denyse’s mother and Ed’s wife -- in whose memory they’ve mounted an annual blood drive located at the .

Wednesday was the second year running for the Ackerly family, friends and acquaintances, working with the New York Blood Center, to collect blood in memory of Teresa, who died after a battle with cancer on Dec. 18, 2008.

Ackerly, originally from Queens but a longtime resident of East Meadow before retiring with husband Ed Ackerly to New Hampshire, was well known locally not just because of Ed’s association with the local fire department, but because of her generosity among friends and neighbors.

“My mother was a selfless person, she took care of a lot of people when she lived here,” said Denyse Kofod (nee Ackerly), on Wednesday. “And when she got sick, she had to have a lot of transfusions as part of her treatment. I thought it would be nice to organize something like this for her -- by helping other people, we're continuing that spirit in her.”

Kofod, an graduate, says she the idea came to her in a simple way -- she saw a billboard for the New York Blood Center one day in 2009 while she was driving. She contacted the East Meadow Fire Department, which agreed to provide the upstairs room for the activity, and was able to put together the first blood drive on May 4, 2010.

Representatives of the blood center, with headquarters in NYC and a regional office in Westbury, note that patients in New York need close to 2,000 people a day to roll up their sleeves and give blood, "literally giving the gift of life."

“The blood we collect goes to local hospitals from the 59th Street Bridge to the Hamptons,” said Dionis Xhindolli of the New York Blood Center. “It takes three pints of blood for a donation -- and we collected over 70 pints last year at the Ackerly’s blood drive. That can be very helpful to a lot of people.”

This is not the only blood drive in the region, of course. According to Xhindolli, the NY metro region’s blood donor center is involved with 15 drives a day.

“We go to high schools, mostly, PTAs, churches, colleges,” he said. “We’ve collected blood at West Point and at Fort Totten.”

And it’s not the only blood drive organized by individuals in remembrance of a loved one, or just because they want to give back to the community somehow.

“We even had someone organize a blood drive in Levittown recently as part of a birthday celebration,” said Xhindolli.

But there is something poignant in this blood drive which Xhindolli felt made it particularly compelling.

“Teresa Ackerly was suffering from cancer, and needed blood -- and we were there for her,” he said. “The Ackerlys felt they wanted to organize a blood drive in her honor. They are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.”