Ajla Zigic remembers being 8 years old in Bosnia, sitting on the front porch, hands clasped around her knees, on soft spring mornings. She remembers watching the sun turn the apples from green to red, then plucking them from the tree her grandmother planted for her the day she was born. She remembers hugging Lassie, the pup her father had seen cowering on a bridge, bullets whizzing over her head. He darted into the crossfire, scooped her up, and brought her home.
By then, Emir Zigic was in the army, not the corporate job that had kept his family so comfortable. When the bank folded, their sizable savings vanished. Even food was scarce—the pup’s ribs made a sharp outline, but they could only feed her what was left of the thin soup they had for dinner.
Lassie thrived anyway, on a lot of love and a little soup. And when the shelling reduced their beautiful home in central Bosnia to rubble and they knew they had to leave, Ajla’s greatest sorrow was leaving the pup behind. The few toys she had, she gave away, saying, “I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t think I’ll be needing these.” But she sobbed at every step of the journey, wanting to go back to Lassie.
The Zigics sought safety in a refugee camp in Croatia before landing permanently in the U.S. Less than a month after they arrived in St. Louis in 1995, Ajla’s grandfather died of lung disease. Ajla was too young to understand why they couldn’t go back to Bosnia for the funeral—they didn’t have the money for plane tickets.
Struggling for Air, Waiting for the Call
Ajla and her brother, Sanjin, grew up in St. Louis. When they were still teenagers, their father started having breathing problems, but no one realized just how bad his lungs were until years later. “One day he was coughing, and he looked like he was drowning,” Ajla recalls.
Ajla drove him to an emergency room, where Emir was diagnosed with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). He cheerfully lined up his rescue inhalers, assuring his kids that all would be well. But COPD comes in stages, and by age 59 he had reached the end stage.
When things felt hopeless, he had always taught his kids to take a minute and regroup. There was always a solution, always something to learn. But the night he was admitted to the ICU at a local hospital—lying on a gurney with machines breathing for him—both he and Ajla secretly felt defeated.
Then a doctor said, “I think he’d be a good candidate for a transplant. I’ll write a recommendation letter and send it over to Barnes-Jewish Hospital.”
Those two sentences turned the kaleidoscope and lit up hope again. To Ajla’s relief, Emir passed all the transplant team’s tests and was accepted to the transplant list that winter. Then, all they could do
was wait.
Ajla could not bear seeing her father as he was, 6-foot-2 and down to 109 pounds. Because chewing food took so much air and energy, he had to choose between eating and breathing. “I’d watch him take two bites and decide that breathing was more important than that third bite,” she recalled. Struggling for air, he stayed in bed, withdrawn from the world.
Foster, her Australian Shepherd-Lab mix, stayed close. Emir had scolded Ajla when she got the dog, saying, “You travel; you’re always out; who’s going to take care of this dog?”
She grinned and said, “You.” Now, the dog could not be pried from his bedside.
Beginning a New Life
On May 31, 2018, at 11 p.m., the call Emir desperately needed finally came. He would have a second chance at life with a healthy set of new lungs. On the drive up Kingshighway, Ajla’s mind drifted to the surreal exchange: in the space of one day, someone else’s death—all she knew was that there had been a car accident—would save her father’s life.
As they neared Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Ajla stayed busy reassuring her father: “You have the best doctors in this country waiting for you!” He nodded. “I’m in good hands.” As they checked in, she kept it light: “You gotta get out of there fast. The World Cup is starting!”
Then, her dad was wheeled away.
Emir’s surgery took about eight hours. Over and over, Ajla told herself, “All this man has survived? He’s not going to let this defeat him.” Besides, she couldn’t afford to lose her source of ready wisdom.
While her father was recovering from the transplant, with a speed that amazed her, they learned that the man who had volunteered to sponsor their family when they came to St. Louis—and who had shown them where the bus stop was, how to navigate the city, where to get help—now had Alzheimer’s disease. So Ajla made several trips to visit him, first bringing him a soft blanket, then a succession of treats.
The fact that she made those visits while helping her father recover—and while working in a full-time executive role—speaks to who Ajla is at heart. “I’m a multitasker,” she says. “Taking an hour out of the day to do something like that is worth so much more than the hour you lost.”
As soon as her dad was walking 10 miles at a time and saying he felt as good as he did in college, Ajla turned her attention to community health advocacy—preventive measures, screenings, and helping people find health care when they didn’t know where to turn. She’d strike up a conversation with a waiter at a banquet or a woman in a grocery line, learn that they had a friend who was suffering, and give them her card. “I don’t want anyone to ever feel like they are alone and there is no help,” she explains. “Because there is help.”
Leaving a Lasting Impact
A year after Emir’s transplant, Ajla bought her father a house. “It’s every kid’s dream to do that for their parents,” she says. However, the house was in her name and she was concerned about her father’s future if something happened to her.
So at 36, Ajla called a lawyer and did the estate planning most people avoid as long as possible. She settled her father’s future care first, then decided she wanted to leave behind some hope for another family.
Her initial idea was to help one family through a transplant. Then she decided she wanted to make an even more substantial, lasting impact that touches thousands of lives—a gift that may lead researchers to find a solution to transplant rejection, a serious potential complication of transplant.
Ajla chose to establish an estate gift dedicated to supporting The Foundation for Barnes-Jewish Hospital’s Transplant Innovation Fund, which helps launch innovative projects that will accelerate transplant research and improve education and patient care and outcomes.
“If I’m going to leave,” she says, “let’s leave with a bang! Let’s leave something behind that’s a lot bigger than myself. The longer I live, the bigger the gift and the impact.” To friends who thought her morbid for making such plans in her mid-30s, she said, “It’s not that I’m planning my death. When you think about what your legacy will be, you start living a little differently. You’re more aware of your actions. You stop stressing over the little things.”
She urges others to “find the one cause that means the world to you. You don’t have to empty your savings account now. You can plan a gift that will mean a lot some day.”
Giving Chocolates and Chances
Emir, meanwhile, was recovering beautifully after his transplant—until Foster broke his heart by dying. “No more dogs,” he announced. “I am never going through this again.” Two months later, determined to wipe that grief away, Ajla showed up carrying a miniature Bernadoodle.
Now his days are sweet: he hangs out with Bernie the Bernadoodle and his grandkids, and every morning, he and Ajla (who lives 5 minutes away, her max distance) go for a 2-mile walk. He always has a chocolate waiting for her afterward; the latest was a Ferrero Rocher hazelnut, a favorite.
“He raised me to be that way too,” Ajla says. “Giving somebody a chocolate. Doing something kind without expecting a thank you or anything else.”
He also gave her his resilience.
He fought on the front lines of the Bosnian War, but he moved on with his life with grace and humor. “When you have two little kids,” he told her, “falling apart is not an option!”
Now, Ajla is glad that they wound up in a city with world-class health care. She’s already had six bonus years with her father—a priceless gift. Her life experiences and her father’s example have given her deep empathy and a heart for helping her community.
At 17, remembering how her parents felt when all their money was lost, she went to work for a bank in St. Louis. Other immigrants trusted only their mattresses. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe in the safety nets set up to protect them. But Ajla saw opportunity. She worked her way into greater and greater responsibility. Eventually, under the leadership and mentorship of Orv Kimbrough, the CEO of Midwest BankCentre who has an extensive background in the not-for-profit world, she became a vice president of community and economic development.
“My focus is on entities and individuals who traditionally don’t get the same level of attention from a bank that established entities and individuals get,” Ajla explains. “People with lower income, refugees, nonprofits … I get to give people chances they otherwise might not have. I get to drive down the street and say, ‘There’s the business that guy was able to open. There’s the home that family moved into. There are the clients that nonprofit was able to reach and help.’”
Coming Full Circle
Ajla’s outspoken altruism also led Michael Roberts, a Foundation board member, to nominate her for the board.
“When I got the call to meet with the Foundation, I thought, ‘Oh, this is it—the universe is calling me,‘” she says. “It’s an important board. And I believe in acts of service.”
She is now in her second year as a board member. “I’ve been learning more about the Foundation and the impact it has on communities,” she says. “You think about donating to the hospital, and you think of patient support, research, staff support. But there is also a significant community health aspect as well, which is something I’m passionate about.”
Given her own job, she is especially excited about the grants the Foundation awards to small area nonprofits focused on improving the health of community members.
Ajla’s favorite part of board service is interacting with donors and those who support them. “I love learning more about their journeys and what has brought them here,” she says. “It’s interesting to see how many of us cross paths in good times and bad, and I get to learn so much about human resiliency.”
As a board member, Ajla also got to tour Mid-America Transplant, an organ and tissue recovery organization that partners with Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “It felt like coming full circle,” she says. As Ajla walked through the building, she thought of all the lives, like her father’s, saved in the nick of time. A few weeks later, when Barnes-Jewish celebrated its 2,000th lung transplant, she rushed to the party—where she instantly bonded with a transplant survivor and her husband.
Two thousand transplants, and behind each one of them is a story as rich as her family’s.
To learn more about making a planned gift through the Foundation, contact Joan Cheaney at [email protected] or 314-286-0704.
Support organ transplant innovation, patient care, and education.
Written by Jeannette Cooperman
Photography by Theo Welling