Not even her kids.

"And I love my kids," she says.

So it says something that she agreed to a demand made by her younger brother, jazz tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker, who was desperately sick and in need of a bone-marrow transplant.

He would allow her to organize a bone-marrow drive on his behalf only if she promised to organize another one on behalf of blacks, who are terribly under-represented on bone-marrow registries.

"I told him yes," Brecker says. "It was the only way he'd let us help him."

Sadly, the international bone-marrow drives that Brecker and others organized on Michael's behalf did not yield a match that would save his life. He died on Jan. 13, 2007, of the leukemia he'd fought for almost three years.

He was just 57 - a husband, father and multiple Grammy winner who'd accompanied Metheny, Hancock, Sanborn, Zappa, Aretha, Quincy, Brubeck, Springsteen, Sinatra and others so well-known we need only a single name to identify them.

"We miss him terribly," says Greenberg, who lives in Cheltenham, where she, Michael and the other famous jazz-playing Brecker brother, Randy, were raised. "We're moving along, but with heavy hearts."

Brecker's promise has been weighing heavily on her, too.

While Michael was alive, she was so busy helping his family care for him that she hadn't time to organize the bone-marrow drive Michael demanded. After he died, she was in "no state of mind" to organize anything.

But last January, after the first anniversary of Michael's death passed, Greenberg says, "It was really bothering me. I knew I had to do something."

This Saturday, Brecker will make good on her promise at the Norris Homes Community Center, where a bone-marrow drive will be held from noon to 3 p.m. Sponsored by Temple Health Connections and the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), the event aims to recruit blacks onto a national bone-marrow registry.

They're urgently needed. According to NMDP, black and minority donors comprise only a fraction of all those on the registry. As a result, minority patients who need a marrow transplant are far more likely than Caucasians to die from lack of a donor match.

"The situation is a double-edged sword," says Elizabethe Westgard, RN, MSN, a Temple University faculty member who is helping to organize Saturday's drive. "Minorities already have barriers to health care," such as language and cultural roadblocks. "Then their risk is compounded by the shortage of donors."

The inequity angered her brother, Greenberg says.

"Mike wanted the registry to be as integrated as the jazz community he belonged to," she says. "He thought it was awful, the disparity in survival rates between white and black patients with the same disease."

Although Saturday's drive is aimed at minorities, anyone can be tested. The procedure requires donors to swab the inside of their cheeks with a cotton swab. If a match is found, the resulting cell donation is a snap: The donor is connected to a machine that harvests adult stem cells from the blood before it re-enters the donor's system.

Rarely, a donor might undergo a surgical harvest of stem cells from pelvic-bone marrow. Either process is a mild inconvenience for the donor, but potentially life-saving for the recipient. That's why donors need to make a long-term commitment to the registry, says Westgard.

"By the time people are on a transplant list, they've usually been through chemo and radiation," she says, "The transplant is their last hope."

And it's a miraculous process to take part in, says Greenberg, whose son has been contacted to be a donor. "If you believe that we're all spiritually connected, it's like we're given a chance to give life. It's wonderful."

As wonderful as a promise made, and fulfilled, in love. *

Norris Homes Community Center is at 1915 N. 11th St. For more info, call 215-451-4339.

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

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