Last summer, 15-year-old Maggie Walsh skipped hanging out with friends and quit the water polo team to spend more time at home with her dad, Carl, who was diagnosed in November 2005 with malignant brain tumors.
It was hard for the La Jolla High School sophomore to see her father, a 51-year-old employee at the international division of Wells Fargo downtown, become so helpless.
“He was home sick and it was really depressing and sad, but I wanted to make something positive out of the situation “” at least as positive as it can be,” she said. “I talked to my dad about it, and he was like ‘Mag, start a foundation. Pull out a piece of paper, put the date on it and make up a name,’ like it was easy.”
But instead of creating her own, she started looking online for charitable organizations that already existed, and in July, she stumbled across the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, the largest non-governmental fund-raising agency for brain tumor research in the world.
She knew it was perfect; after seeing her dad “” affectionately called “Ki” by friends and family “” suffer the effects of cancer, she couldn’t imagine what it must be like for children. It was her first time setting up a personal Web site, but Maggie soon discovered it was easier than she thought.
“I remember the day I did it “” I ran and told my parents,” she said. “My dad was laying in bed and he was too sick to come look at it.”
He also suffered short-term memory loss, which meant every few days Maggie needed to remind him she had created the site.
“He would be like ‘No way, Mag, that’s awesome,'” she recalled.
Over the last seven months, her Web site has raised more than $7,000 for the foundation. And she is confident she will reach her $10,000 goal by July, when the site expires.
Many family members and friends also believe in Maggie, according to the Walshes’ neighbor Jamie Miller, whose children fell in love with Maggie when she began baby-sitting them four years ago.
“Here is something that would stop any teenager dead in their tracks and instead she went for it and did something positive for society,” Miller said. “Maggie just pours her heart out in everything she does and everyone she touches just realizes what a kind soul she is.”
The Walsh family attended La Jolla’s All Hallows Church with the Millers and the families developed a friendship through community interactions. Maggie’s older brother, Peter, a senior at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, was well known in the community for his musical talents and Maggie excels as an athlete and student, Miller said.
Maggie’s mother, Jeannie, worked as a preschool teacher in the past and was getting ready to accept a job at a local school when the family learned of the diagnosis, Miller said.
“They are just an amazing family “” a family you don’t see in this day and age,” she said. “They had a very spiritual and special bond “” it was like that even before Ki got sick “” and it was very evident when I first met them years ago that they had it right and knew what was important.”
The mother of two remembers getting a call from Maggie one morning while she was driving her children, ages 9 and 11, to school. Miller had contacted Maggie about baby-sitting and wasn’t prepared for the news she would share.
“It was devastating,” she said. “I had to pull over to the side of street, I was so shocked. He was a young, healthy, vibrant man, and you always think it’s not going to happen to someone you know, but it does.”
After a tough yearlong battle, Carl succumbed to his illness in November 2006, but Maggie is still fighting. She has continued to encourage donations on her Web site, and by doing so, is keeping her father’s memory alive.
Funeral services for her father were held in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., and people were asked to make donations in his honor to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation through Maggie’s Website, she said.
Though the word has spread among her immediate family, Maggie has not told many community members about her endeavor. She hopes to quietly finish raising an additional $3,000 and then begin her next fund-raising campaign, the nature of which she is unsure at this time.
The teenager has decided that she wants to work in healthcare, preferably with children, and is looking into volunteering at local hospitals as soon as she is old enough, she said.
But for now, she is staying focused on the immediate impact she can make through her site.
“It gives me something to look forward to because I love watching it grow,” she said. “It makes me happy because I know it would make my dad really happy, and if I can make the smallest difference at all, I know how important that is.”
For more information, visit www.firstgiving.com/mwalsh.