I guess it all starts with this picture, two babies lying together. What you can’t see is that we are lying on a small scale, born so tiny and premature that when our weights were added together, we totaled all of 7.5 pounds.
From our very first breaths, Mikey was my teammate and taught me we’re better off working together. Together, drawing on each other’s warmth and heartbeats, we gained strength and overcame a lot in our first few weeks in this big world. From there, he was my teammate in everything, from helping each other climb out of our cribs (our parents bought safety nets to try and stop us… which didn’t work, sorry mom!), to competing on Premier’s gymnastics team, to navigating our big junior high together when we didn’t know our schedules.
The dream Mikey had to have “no other child go through what he did” was a dream of epic proportions, yet Mikey had started creating ripples 15 years before he ever uttered those words. He showed us the importance of teamwork, relying on one another’s strengths, and leveraging each other’s weight to make things happen, and that is exactly what Gift From A Child has done: it has created teams and partnerships across the childhood cancer community that never existed so research can be furthered and a cure can be found.
Mikey was extraordinary, yes, but he was also just a regular kid who really liked board games and picking on his twin sister. For his birthday, in whatever way you can, we encourage you to join Swifty’s team this year and know that we’re creating an unstoppable wave when we add our collective strength and weight together.
Bridget Gustafson
Board Member
Michael’s Twin Sister
