Alessandra's Brighten Your Day Memorial Fund

Please help us to honor the memory and life of Alessandra Glickman. How do we begin to tell you about our Alessandra? She was a unique and rare child who was frozen in time and never did anything by the book. Her life brought us so much joy and also so many challenges but her funny, sassy, silly personality that both she and her brother inherited from their dad, kept us laughing our way through each one. She left us on July 8th, less than a week after her 20th birthday and our hearts are broken.

Alessandra came into this world as a fighter and spent way too many days in and out of hospitals and therapy sessions. She taught us that all our worries early on about her life on this earth having Down syndrome could quickly vanish in a second when faced with the fragility of her health. She thrived and flourished despite her Graves disease at age two, brain cancer at six, heart valve replacement at ten and bout after bout of pneumonia. Radiation kept her brain frozen around age six or seven and although she could do many things herself she was heavily dependent on us for everyday tasks and would be forever.

And through it all, we saw a little girl that inspired not only us but so many others. Her innocent naivete was a blessing in disguise as she always had a positive attitude even in the darkest times. Every nurse, therapist, doctor, and fellow patient that she came across always left with a smile. She laughed, joked her way through the tough times, and always had time to cheer others up. She was a light to others, a funny quirky little kid who made the hard times seem bearable. She taught us so many more life lessons than we ever taught her as her parents.

On July 4th, we took a train to Madrid, the city in which she was born, to meet up with her brother, Luca, to celebrate his 18th birthday. Only our second trip to Madrid ever as a family, we walked for hours around the city showing the kids where we lived when she was a baby, our favorite museum, ate churros and chocolate and walked through the Retiro park where we used to go to relax when pregnant with her. A perfect 24 hours. Then she collapsed on the street. A massive stroke from a spontaneous carotid artery dissection. Three days later she left us and we headed back home on the train with her ashes on our laps and our lives forever changed.

Tomorrow it will be a month that she is gone but it feels like years since we’ve heard her laugh and seen her beautiful smile. The silence in our home is truly deafening without her. She is everywhere and nowhere all at once and we are struggling to make sense of all of this and find meaning. Alessandra was the heart of our family and now there is a hole in our hearts that is too vast to fill. There’s a feeling of us being utterly lost and lonely even when being surrounded by friends and family that only her coming back to us could fix. We are looking for her light in all this darkness and a path forward.

Last week, while waiting in a long line to buy tickets, we decided to buy two extra and give them away to someone at the very back of the line. We found a young 20-something couple to give them to and they seemed a bit startled and asked why. We didn’t want to sadden them with our grief so we just said, “We’re having a bad day and thought it would be nice to brighten someone else's” and it was the first time in weeks that we felt a tinge of joy.

This GoFundMe is to keep the light of Alessandra alive. By starting a fund in her name, The Alessandra Glickman Brighten Your Day Fund, we want to brighten others' days through random and not-so-random acts of kindness. From talking to a security guard at an airport to the ticket booth lady at a museum, Alessandra and her ever-present hand puppets always had a way of making people smile. Every dollar of this fund would be used to brighten the day of people around the world the way Alessandra always did. Whether buying all new musical instruments for an inner city school, paying for groceries for a single parent, buying new shoes for a child on the street or providing a warm blanket for someone who needs one, we will strive to live up to our daughter’s spirit.

We were not always perfect parents to either of our children but we did teach them to cherish experiences in life over material things and that goodwill nourishes the soul. We will start this fund with some of our own money but hope that others will join in.

Our family has always lived our lives out loud. Never struggling with our challenges privately but sharing them with our world to diminish their weight. Humor and laughter helped to carry us through each one. This time is so different though and it's hard to see a path towards healing. Rob and I have been spending a lot of time these past two weeks out in nature and although it brings a sense of peace, it hasn’t mended the deep hole in our hearts. We both agree that the only way forward for us will be to focus our energy on helping others.

We knew that our time with her would be limited - we just didn’t know how short it would ultimately be. Despite her health challenges, Alessandra lived an amazingly full life full of experiences, travel, adventure and love. She travelled all over the world with us to over 35 countries, even volunteering twice with us at a school in Tanzania and tried everything and anything. She gave her love out to others and was loved fiercely.

She left us too soon and we miss her more than life.