Mattie Miracle Walk 2023 was a $131,249 success!

Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation Promotional Video

Thank you for keeping Mattie's memory alive!

Dear Mattie Blog Readers,

It means a great deal to us that you take the time to write to us and to share your thoughts, feelings, and reflections on Mattie's battle and death. Your messages are very meaningful to us and help support us through very challenging times. To you we are forever grateful. As my readers know, I promised to write the blog for a year after Mattie's death, which would mean that I could technically stop writing on September 9, 2010. However, at the moment, I feel like our journey with grief still needs to be processed and fortunately I have a willing support network still committed to reading. Therefore, the blog continues on. If I should find the need to stop writing, I assure you I will give you advanced notice. In the mean time, thank you for reading, thank you for having the courage to share this journey with us, and most importantly thank you for keeping Mattie's memory alive.


As Mattie would say, Ooga Booga (meaning, I LOVE YOU)! Vicki and Peter



The Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation celebrates its 7th anniversary!

The Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation was created in the honor of Mattie.

We are a 501(c)(3) Public Charity. We are dedicated to increasing childhood cancer awareness, education, advocacy, research and psychosocial support services to children, their families and medical personnel. Children and their families will be supported throughout the cancer treatment journey, to ensure access to quality psychosocial and mental health care, and to enable children to cope with cancer so they can lead happy and productive lives. Please visit the website at: www.mattiemiracle.com and take some time to explore the site.

We have only gotten this far because of people like yourself, who have supported us through thick and thin. So thank you for your continued support and caring, and remember:

.... Let's Make the Miracle Happen and Stomp Out Childhood Cancer!

A Remembrance Video of Mattie

March 14, 2010

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Tonight's picture was taken in June of 2007, on our trip to Lancaster, PA. Outside of one of the stores we stopped at, was a black and white cow statue. Mattie knew I loved cows, particularly Holstein cows. It was the family joke. My mom even adopted me a black and white cow at a farm in upstate New York one year as a gift. For the longest time I had a framed picture of Daisy, my cow, in our kitchen. So when Mattie saw this cow outside the store, he wanted us to take a picture with it. I could have just shown you the picture of us tonight, but I thought having some context for why the picture was taken would be helpful. 

Poem of the day: FOR JAMIE (my son) - Author unknown

IT HAS BEEN A LONG, LONELY YEAR FOR ME,
AS IT WAS BEFORE IT WILL NEVER BE.
FOR PART OF MY HEART IS MISSING STILL,
AN EMPTY SPACE THAT NOTHING CAN FILL
IT SEEMS THAT EVERY MOMENT I THINK OF YOU, EVERYTHING REMINDS ME OF THINGS YOU WOULD SAY OR DO-AND THOSE THOUGHTS ARE WITH ME EVERY DAY,
EVEN IN MY DREAMS YOU STAY.
I SAW YOU TAKE YOUR VERY FIRST BREATH,
AND I WAS BY YOUR SIDE AS YOU FACED DEATH. YOUR COURAGE AND FAITH ASTOUNDED ME-I WAS SO WONDERFULLY BLESSED YOUR MOM TO BE.
ONE DAY I’LL SEE YOU AGAIN , MY SON,
WHEN MY TIME ON THIS EARTH IS DONE.
UNTIL THEN, YOU’RE A PICTURE IN MY MIND-
OF SMILES, AND LAUGHS, AND BLUE (Brown, in Mattie's case) EYES THE SHINE.
TO BRING FLOWERS IS ALL I CAN DO NOW FOR YOU,
BUT I KNOW THAT GOD WILL SEE ME THROUGH.
MANY THINGS IN LIFE CAN BRING A MOTHER PAIN-
TO LOSE A CHILD MEANS SHE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.
FOR THE DAYS AHEAD STRETCH ENDLESSLY,
THEY ROLL ALONG LIKE WAVES IN THE SEA.
I ATTEMPT A SMILE TO SOMETIMES HIDE THE TEARS
SOME FOLKS DON’T UNDERSTAND DAILY CRYING FOR YEARS.
BUT WITHOUT YOU, I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO,
EVERY SECOND OF MY LIFE I THINK OF YOU.
I PRAY FOR STRENGTH TO HOLD ON UNTIL AGAIN I SEE
THOSE CLEAR BLUE (brown) EYES LOOKING BACK AT ME.
IN THIS LIFE WE NEVER KNOW WHAT TRIALS WE MUST FACE,
AND I BELIEVE MY GOD WILL SUSTAIN ME WITH HIS GRACE.
BUT NO MATTER HOW MUCH PAIN LOSING YOU BRINGS,
I WOULD NOT TRADE THE TIME I HAD WITH YOU,
MY SON, NO–NOT FOR ANYTHING.

As we had to move the clocks one hour ahead today, I couldn't help but acknowledge that spring is upon us. I always loved spring time, for many reasons. I am a warm weather person at heart, I am in awe of how trees and plants come back to life after a long and hard winter, and for the past seven years, spring signified the time when Mattie would turn another year older. Mattie's birthday is on April 4. This year, Easter happens to fall on Mattie's birthday. This has never happened before. Somehow celebrating the rebirth of Jesus and the birth of Mattie on the same day seems very symbolic. As if God is trying to tell me something, because I do not believe it is just coincidence that Mattie's birthday falls on Easter Sunday. Maybe this is a sign to me, or I hope it is, that Mattie too has been reborn in heaven. He is happy, out of pain, and given eternal life.

I will never forget the day Mattie was born, and for the first time today, I associated my daily headaches with remembering Mattie. I never had a migraine headache in my life until I went into labor. Since that time, I do not know a day without a headache. It is just the severity of the pain that separates one day from the other. This daily pain is a constant reminder of the miracle that happened in our lives on April 4, 2002. However, as April 4, 2010 approaches, I am plagued with how to remember Mattie or celebrate his birthday. One of my board members this weekend shared with me a story about a seven year old friend of her son's, who died over 12 years ago. Despite how young these children were, they still remember their friend today, 12 years later. On this boy's birthday, some gather together around the memorial garden his school planted for him, and messages travel through facebook wishing this boy a happy birthday. When my colleague shared this story with me, I found it very touching. It was touching because after all this time, this boy was not forgotten, and I can only imagine how moved his parents are by this outpouring of love each year. No parent wants to think their child who died served no purpose in this world. Keeping a child's memory alive is the ultimate gift I believe you can give grieving parents.

Today I received a lovely e-mail from the "Magic Man." As many of my readers know, the Magic Man is Bob Weiman, Mattie's lower school head of school. Bob taught Mattie magic tricks, performed with Mattie at the hospital and at his walk last May, and in the process gave Mattie the confidence to believe he was special and yet normal. Normal because performing allowed him to forget about cancer for a while, and learn skills that could entertain others. Bob let me know that the second grade parents (remember Mattie would have been in second grade this year) spearheaded a collection to plant a memorial tree in Mattie's honor on the lower school campus. I want to thank Ann Bailey for chairing this project. Ann's daughter, Claire, was in Mattie's kindergarten class. I saw Claire at Abigail's gingerbread decorating party in December. Claire told me then that she misses Mattie and thinks of him often. I am not sure why I was so surprised to hear this out of the mouth of an eight year old, but she expressed herself beautifully and I told her I understood how she felt. Bob let me know that there would also be a dedication of this tree on the campus in the spring. I find it ironic that Bob's message came to me today, as I have been struggling with how to acknowledge Mattie's birthday and his loss in our lives. A tree planted on a campus that he loved seems like a beautiful way to memorialize Mattie, and I have a feeling this will be a tree I will be visiting often in the future. Bob's message meant a great deal to me, as does the contributions of all the parents who are helping make this possible.

Peter and I went out to lunch together. We are beginning to acknowledge the times we feel sad, and are becoming less protected with each other. This may sound strange, but when two people are grieving the loss of a child, it is very challenging for them to turn to each other for help or comfort. There is almost a fear that if you express how you are feeling, this will cause more pain for the other person. We continue to work through this and we had our moments of crying through lunch, and then moments of calm or laughter.

I would like to end tonight's posting with a message from my friend, Charlie. Charlie wrote, "As I read your blog from the past two days, all I could think was how difficult it is to rejoin "the real world" as I have sometimes heard it described, once you are removed from it in some way. Your experience with Mattie's illness is in some ways akin to soldiers who have gone to war and stared death in the face. Those who make it back are forever changed; their sense of what is important and what is not, is very finely tuned in a way that the average person's simply is not. I too have been listening to the St Jude's telethon on the radio and thinking of Mattie every time I got in the car and turned the station on. I heard some of the heartbreaking stories, some ended happily and some did not. It was gratifying to hear that in two days, even in this tough economic time that they raised over 460 thousand dollars. It says that people do care about what happens to others, even those they do not personally know. Often callers said, "no one in my family is ill, I am grateful and therefore I am donating." I always hope that at some point we will find cures and all the stories that are told will end happily. I read about your board meeting over the past two days and how you regretted that you could not give them all the effort you would normally have because of Mattie's illness and subsequent death. I think that was important although difficult for them to hear. Often those who work with us do not understand what kind of time and energy it takes to do what you and Peter did; how much of a sacrifice (however willingly) one has to make to have even a chance at survival. It seems as though you touched both hearts and minds of those you were on the board with and connected at some very deep levels. I am not surprised that one of the members shared some very personal information with you as you are someone who projects the ability to listen and to empathize and it seems as though you were able to help each other. I hope that each day brings a little more light into your life; I hold you gently in my thoughts.

Here is the video for "I just came back from a war" by Darryl Worley. In some ways what he expresses is what I read in your blog and hear from my clients... "I never will be the same." Battling for Mattie as you did is like being a soldier in a way. Thank goodness you had the help and goodwill of many to support you as you did so."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwpO8Q1u4Ss

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