Tonight's picture was taken in November of 2006. Mattie was four years old. This was an activity he absolutely LOVED to do in our living room. Mattie enjoyed building models and then painting them. As you can see he was working on building a dinosaur. He assembled the puzzle, glued it, and then painted it. The beauty of Mattie was he understood the concept of making a mess and knew he had to keep the glue and paint on the newspapers. I never had to stop him from running around the house spreading paint everywhere. In this sense, he was exactly like me!
Quote of the day: Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. ~ CS Lewis
I am not a big social media person. In fact, if I did not run the Foundation, I probably wouldn't even have social media accounts. But because I need to spread awareness about Mattie Miracle, I manage a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram account. Over the weekend, I received a text message from my good friend Mary Ann. She clued me in that something was wrong with my Instagram account. She asked if I sent her something and I said no. So she reported the interaction to Instagram. However, from there I received a cascade of messages, all kinds.... texts, emails, and phone messages from friends warning me that someone was posing as me on Instagram. This person set up an Instagram page that looked VERY similar to Mattie Miracle's and the name of the page was VERY close to my actual Instagram URL. In addition, this person was individually contacting my friends, asking them how they were doing, making pleasantries and then encouraging them to apply for a government grant. Now here is the interesting part about all of this!
Every single person who was contacted knew immediately it was NOT me! I am talking about people who know me well to people who know me only on the periphery. One of my childhood cancer friends was so disturbed by the messages she was receiving from the hacker that she literally called me on the phone. My friend has been going through her own trauma, so we haven't connected live in two years. But this hacker situation bothered her so much that she reach out to me. We both determined it was fate that we re-engaged at this point in our lives. Talk about something good arising from something sinister.
But the message I took away from all of this is that people who have crossed my path (no matter what the capacity), seem to understand the high moral principle that guides my life. They knew immediately that I would never solicit them for funds in this manner and my cancer friend literally told the person who was pretending to be me that they were scum!
Given all that is happening in my life now, I can't tell you how much it meant to me that my friends are looking out for me in this way and took the time to remind me that I live my life with high integrity and I have to say it is flattering to receive such feedback.
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