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UCLA Mind and Body Project

1/5/2021

I received a "Dear Madison" email yesterday from the Principle Investigator at UCLA's Mind-Body Research Lab. Given Madison had a cancer that was registered at UCLA, they were looking to her for help to identify approaches to enhance the well-being of other young adults impacted by cancer.

Madison would have embraced that! I replied yesterday outlining that we lost Madison in 2018, and added picture below, and sent Marcie links to the Cancer Support Center and how to group host and her peers helped lead her to acceptance.

Marcie sent a very touching reply and amazingly it all happened three years to the day that her physical body left us all. She still sings her own favorite song through others and I was amazed by the coincidence of this.

Wait, what... coincidence??? Life is a gift; celebrate it every day!

Madison's 2009 Scrapbook

1/4/2021

It's hard to imagine that it's been three years ago today since we all lost Madison. It feels like just yesterday... and a lifetime ago.
Many of the people she forged close friendships as a young adult didn't have the opportunity to know her as a kid. I recently stumbled upon a scrapbook she made in 2009. I've obviously seen it numerous times but it's been a while since I read it cover to cover.

Madison was a huge fan of her ‘uncle’ Steve Fossett: (<- link, why he was a hero of Madi's). She couldn’t differentiate my uncle Richard's brother from a monkeys uncle in 2009, and Steve was the only relative in her life at the time who was famous for all of his extreme aviation accomplishments, then suddenly went missing in a small plane. Google (in their Map’s application) maintained fresh imaging of the suspected area where Steve went missing, and Madison and I spent many hours looking in Google Maps grids socialized by the media. If memory serves, his disappearance was on the nightly news and more often than not after dinner, Madison would ask if we "could go look for Uncle Steve”. Given he was the first person to fly solo around the world in a hot air balloon -and- solo in a fixed wing airplane among other things, Madison assigned him a hero badge in her scrapbook, a badge that she would adopt at age 18 with her one-in-a-million cancer... chordoma.

Another one of Madison's scrapbook memories took place when Madison was 6 or 7ish: For whatever reason, I awoke about 5AM. Whelp, I'm not going back to sleep and on the way by Madison's room for coffee... she's not in her room. Her scrapbook memory noted the trauma we all felt back then. I got Angela up, said to check the inside the house and front yard; I'll search the back yard which included the pool. In short, the fan in our bedroom was on and Madison went out the front door... opposite side of the house. Locking herself out yelling "dadddddy, DADDDDDY" only netted a neighbor hearing her. They came over and knocked on our front door, no answer, so they took her inside their home. Madison knew our home number, they called, and we were reunited. Phew! Interesting Madison wrote that she was out front for hours: I know that exact feeling... just south of panic when it's dark and our cub isn't in the house, the backyard, the front yard... it felt like an eternity.
Despite the fact that Madison could swim, our pool had an alarm such that even if a tennis ball was dropped in, a loud siren went off with a remote speaker. The night after Madison was MIA, every exit door and window had magnetic switch alarms.

Even as a young lass, Madison was a very expressive writer, noting "... the copious amounts of pure nature is beautiful". Every year we'd river raft for two days at Kings River, then drop down to Pine Flats lake with our friends, a wide array of boats and water toys, and play for another week.

In theory you should be able to click on each picture of her scrapbook and Madison's world according to her.

UCLA Mind and Body Project

Madison's 2009 Scrapbook

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