Over the years, we worked with a large number of Make a Wish kids, mostly kids who wanted to meet Michael Jordan. We did a few with Karl Malone, the USA Basketball team, and a number of meet and greets at NBA All-Star Weekend.
Pretty tough assignment, emotionally, but, then again, I always knew the kids had a much, much tougher assignment ahead of them.
I will cut and paste a Kevin Ding article on Kobe Bryant's volunteer efforts with Make a Wish that ran in the OCR, but I also pass along a short note of advice.
Early in my career, one of my best friends in the world, Josh, who was the head PR guy for the LA Lakers in the Kareem-Magic-Worthy era, mentioned to me that he did a number of Make a Wish requests with the championship Lakers teams. At one meet and greet, in particular, a writer did a note or column and stated that the child has 'terminal' cancer.
The problem?
The family and doctors of the child had never informed the kid of the fact his/her cancer was, indeed, terminal. The kid learned about it when one of his friends read the story to him the next day.
Just think about that.
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Kobe Bryant's work with kids brings joy, though sometimes it's fleeting
The first part of the sentence comes out naturally, spoken with the understated affection of fathers toward sons. The end part is reality sinking back in.
"He wouldn't shut up about it," Billy Thorington says, "until his last day."
Billy is reflecting on how memorable it was for his son, with the help of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, to meet Kobe Bryant. And as Billy taps back into the spirit, explaining why it was such a perfect wish, he slips into the present tense for just a moment: "Cody loves basketball."
Billy doesn't notice it. He just goes on to say how right it felt to place a Bryant-autographed photo in Cody's casket.
We met Cody Thorington, 15, and Chris Chavez, 14, on these pages in March in a piece about Bryant's work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Now it's time to say goodbye.
The Make-A-Wish Foundation helps those with life-threatening situations, not necessarily terminal ones, yet there are many unhappy endings. In answering every Make-A-Wish request to come his way, Bryant has met more than 100 kids. He estimates 20 have died within a year.
"Some of them days after," he said.
In that room, the talk is of embracing life. That was the crux of the column in March: Cody, Chris and the unique energy that charged a bare, little room at Staples Center where they separately met Bryant. Rest assured, it was far more party than pity.
That's because the kids smile — for a change — and Bryant insists on smiling back.
"It's tough every time, but they don't want to see you down," Bryant said. "They don't want to be treated like patients. They just want to be kids. They just want to feel normal. They just want to have fun."
Cody and Chris did all that in their meetings with Bryant about a week apart. Eight months later, they died about a week apart, too.
One of the things Bryant addressed in all that life talk with Cody is how to be motivated by adversity: "If they say you can't do it, prove them wrong." Even though Cody's form of cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma, is considered incurable, they were not empty words.
Just three weeks before his death, Cody did prove them wrong: The doctors said he would never walk again, but there Cody was, up and out of his wheelchair and even crossing the street — amazing his relatives with a surprise stroll to their house.
A week later, the tide turned and Cody was in the hospice. Billy would be there — same as he was early on in taking his sons and leaving his wife upon discovering she was abusing them. To be with Cody as his health declined, Billy missed more than a few shifts at his job in Davenport, Iowa, pulling parts from damaged cars. That didn't help the financial disaster left from two years of Cody's medical bills.
What did help was a $5,000 check from the "Nation of Neighbors Gift Patrol," a nonprofit group that heard of Billy's plight and surprised him just before Christmas. As wonderful as Billy said that was in keeping him from losing his house, the hospital bills still need settling. There's also the matter of Cody's headstone; they won't deliver it until Billy finds money for that, too.
This isn't a story about saving grace or everything working out. What the sadness does lead to is Bryant holding his daughters for an extra deep breath at bedtime, and perhaps we can all resolve to appreciate what we have a little more.
About all else there is on the bright side is that the Make-A-Wish Foundation keeps helping, Bryant keeps meeting kids, and those kids do keep smiling.
Upon meeting Bryant two Fridays ago, O'Neal Mitchell of Tenaha, Texas, surmised that Bryant wasn't as tall as advertised. Bryant, listed at 6-foot-7 when he entered the NBA and now listed at 6-6 (without the Afro, apparently), came clean with a grin: "I'm probably 6-5 in sneaks."
Bryant's wife, Vanessa, was there and had prodded him by saying she suspected the same thing — and measured her husband at home one day at 6-4 3/4. O'Neal smiled at getting the truth; he smiled again when Bryant dropped to a knee without being asked for photos next to the wheelchair-bound O'Neal, paralyzed since that day on the football field
Last Friday, Bryant met leukemia-stricken Randall Jones, just 4 1/2 years old. Randall started out nervously moving a mini-basketball from one hand to the other — until Bryant put him at ease with stories of how he used to play ball at that age.
When his mother would hear Bryant dribbling a ball and tell him, "Kobe, put that ball away!" Bryant would dribble inches off the ground to keep quieter — until his mother heard that, too. "And then I had to put the ball away," Bryant said, flashing an aw-shucks smile.
Soon enough, Randall was relaxed enough to ask Bryant point-blank: "You want to play me?" before showing off quite a nifty crossover-dribble move. When Bryant left, under his arm was a book the boy from Dallas had made out of construction paper, and on the last page was this, scribbled childishly but in very sure all caps: "THANK YOU FOR MAKING MY WISH COME TRUE."
These were the sort of memorable moments that Cody, Chris and their families got to place in vaults that should have had so many more memorable moments — but didn't.
Despite Chris spending three weeks in November 2006 in intensive care, then his heart stopping last January during a cancer-related blood transfusion, he and his family made it in from Salt Lake City to meet Bryant in March. Chris wore a Lakers sweatshirt, Air Zoom Kobe I sneakers and a smile.
He smiled again when he was back in a Salt Lake City hospital shortly before he died. Some Jazz players visited Chris and asked if he was a Jazz fan: "No," he said, grinning, "I like the Lakers."
Back in March, Chris' mother, Hasani, had said: "Due to his illness, we pretty much lost everything — our house, our car and even our dog. But that's OK. As long as Chris feels good, we all feel good, too."
This time, she says: "He was even buried with his Kobe shoes."
Hasani asks me to sign Chris' online guest-book obituary. As I do so, I notice the previous two entries are both hers.
Her words are far more meaningful than any I could write there or here.
"Hi, Christopher ... this is Mom. You've been gone for 15 days, and I miss you so much. Tomorrow is your birthday, and we will visit you. That's a promise. I cry every day for you, but knowing that you're no longer in pain eases my heartfelt pain. I'll love you always."
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