A MESSAGE FROM Laura's NYC Marathon for Maria
This year, my daughter, Maria would be 26 years old. In her memory, and for all the other beautiful children like her, I am running the NYC marathon to support the SUDC Foundation!
It's been 25 years of missing her sweet earthling presence since she died at 15 months of age. We have not learned the medical reason that caused her death, and therefore her death is classified as sudden unexplained death in childhood (SUDC).
SUDC affects about 400 children between the ages of 1 and 18 years in the U.S. each year. Their deaths remain unexplained after a thorough investigation, including an autopsy. (Learn more at sudc.org )
Living without your child is hard and missing them never ends. Not knowing why she died, seemed at first unfathomable and continues to feel surreal.
To help other families, faciliate research and raise awareness of these tragedies, I co-founded the SUDC program in 2001 and later the SUDC Foundation in 2014 when the program was ready to evolve into its own 501c3 nonprofit organization. Its mission is to promote awareness, advocate for research and support those affected by sudden unexpected and unexplained deaths in childhood.
Through the work of the SUDC Foundation, we have supported more than 1200 bereaved families across 22 countries, teaching families coping skills, providing peer support, and also individualized advocacy services.
Research into SUDC has been scarce. Public funding has focused on the more prevalent sudden deaths in infants (like SIDS). When you search online for research articles about SIDS, you will see they number more than 12,000 while publications on SUDC are about 50.
As a result of private donations to the SUDC Foundation, we have now funded more than $2 million dollars to support critical SUDC research. These projects have resulted in more than 2/3 of the above publications in existence which continue to improve our understanding of these inexplicable tragedies. (For more information: https://sudc.org/published-research-articles/ )
As a licenced Physical Therapist, my career took a diversion after Maria's death. Living without answers and continuing to meet newly bereaved families was not acceptable to me. I now work fulltime researching the causes of SUDC, and to date, we have uncovered the causes of some child deaths that were previously unexplained.
But, I know we can understand many more AND we can learn to prevent them.
Simply put, our knowledge today is limited by financial resources.
In this light, I would be so grateful for your generosity towards my fundraising pursuits to support SUDC Research.
Gotta run now, as I continue to train to cross that finish line in Central Park- one mile for each of the years since Maria first made me a Mom. :)
Thank you and take good care,
Laura
