After I watched my only son slowly succumb to pancreatic cancer, I was convinced that I would never again know joy. Yet it was only six months later, after I established a memorial foundation in Gregory’s name, that my spirits began to revive in a big way.
Watching my dead kid’s foundation consistently pound the living shit out of your dead kid’s foundation has been, without a doubt, the most rewarding experience of my life. Your dead kid’s foundation went down harder than a sack of potatoes in an airshaft. Harder even than when your own son went down to intermediate spinal muscular atrophy.
It was like Ali versus Foreman. First, my dead son’s foundation works alongside doctors and nurses to determine the needs of patients suffering from pancreatic cancer on an individual, case-by-case basis. Left jab. Then it successfully lobbies for increased access to cutting-edge care for those patients, including clinical trials and experimental treatments. Right hook. And finally, it funds six different quality-of-life projects. Uppercut. Boom! TKO. It’s the Gregory Nass Foundation, by unanimous decision!
I only wish my Gregory was alive to see how hard we’re slamming it in your face.
My dead kid’s foundation raised over $4 million toward palliative care for those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year alone, and nearly $2 million in support of experimental cancer therapies. All that, plus a few hundred thou left over to co-fund a PBS series about childhood cancers. Ka-ching! Now, what did your dead kid’s foundation do again? Oh, that’s right, it “donated toys, videos, and books to area hospitals and treatment centers for the use of young SMA-2 patients.” Will you do me a favor? Ask your dead kid’s foundation what the pavement tastes like.
I have your brochure in front of me. (Nice two-color job, by the way. Where did you have these printed, a Gutenberg press?) Ah, yes, “giving young SMA-2 patients the unique opportunity to meet their heroes in sports and entertainment.” Uh, did that include current heroes? Because you must have been hard-pressed to find anyone under the age of 12 who was into Andre Rison. Incidentally, all l have to do is page Donovan McNabb and he’s at a kid’s fucking bedside that day. Within two hours during the off-season.
I know there are times when you wish your dead son’s foundation was more like mine, but claiming that the two are “comparable in their aims and achievements” is total bullshit. No offense, but your dead kid’s foundation couldn’t find a cure for SMA-2 if his life depended on it. Which, I believe, it did.
Shit, if my son had died from Type 2, we’d have found so many cures for it by now that I’d be using them to wipe my ass.
But this is nothing new. My kid’s routine thrashing of your kid started way before they were memorialized by philanthropic institutions. Just a glance at their respective scorecards will tell you that. For starters, Gregory, despite being two years younger than your Brian, was first to have his illness pronounced terminal. Chalk up one for my boy right there. Then, during his last days, my son had a whopping seven vital organs fail him, compared with your son’s measly four. And that’s counting your son’s kidneys as two separate organs.
In your face!
Don’t feel too bad, though. Maybe a memorial foundation just isn’t your dead kid’s thing. Maybe he’d be better at lending his name to a local charity walk or a patch on a large SMA-2 quilt. I’d chip in a couple bucks. He could obviously use the help.
