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First, Adam Abernathy became a face of the Prop 8 opposition in 2008 because he loved his gay mormon husband, Dave Ferguson.

In 2012, Adam desperately needed a kidney transplant and it turns out that Dave was a great match. Then their story of love and support and generally being awesome people turned into an even bigger and better one when they decided to become part of an altruistic kidney-donation chain.

A soon-to-be wed gay couple, a retired teacher and his wife, and two pairs of fathers and sons were among those whose lives were changed one extraordinary day this week when a 35-year-old single mother of four from North Carolina donated a kidney to a stranger in New York.

“I’m not losing nothing,” Honica Brittman said this week, sitting in a blue and white hospital gown before surgery in which she would give, for free, the initial kidney in a chain of five kidney transplants at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.

“To actually help somebody live a little bit, a lot longer, that’s an awesome thing,” she said…

The chain started with Brittman, who donated a kidney to a 39-year-old television producer whose fiancée and partner of more than 10 years donated to a businessman from upstate New York.

In turn, the businessman’s son, a college-age student who felt that for being healthy and the youngest of four sons, he should step up on behalf of his father and donate one of his kidneys to another young man, a 23-year-old originally from Haiti.

His father then donated to a retired teacher from New Jersey.

Here’s a video piece on them:

(Full disclosure: Adam is a great friend of mine and I love him dearly. This story would warm my heart, make me optimistic for the world and cry happy tears even if i didn’t know him.)