If you’re a single parent caring for a child with a life-threatening illness, you probably can’t imagine anything worse than the prospect of watching your son or daughter die.
But while dealing with such a crisis, there are countless other issues to consider: How will you pay the hospital bills that your insurance won’t cover—or all the bills, if you have no insurance at all? How will you pay for groceries or child care for your other children? How can you afford to take weeks or months off from your job to sit by your sick child’s bedside?
When Valerie Sobel’s eighteen-year-old son Andre became ill in 1994, she was as fortunate as any mother could be in such a situation. Sobel, a Hungarian-born interior designer and former actress living in Los Angeles, was married and financially secure.
At the time, it didn’t occur to her that she was lucky, though: “I was alone in the whole universe with my child,” she says. “Having been married and being financially privileged doesn’t become apparent in the eye of your storm.”
During the dark period of Andre’s illness, Sobel watched helplessly as her son lost his sight and speech, and eventually died of a brain tumor. And it wasn’t long before tragedy struck again: just before the one-year anniversary of Andre’s death, her husband Erwin Sobel, devastated by the loss of their son, committed suicide.
In the following years, Sobel struggled to make meaning from these two monumental losses. She had inherited $10 million from her husband’s estate, and wanted to use the money to honor the memory of her beloved son, Andre. It took her five years to come up with the right plan, however.
“A period of gestation was truly necessary,” she says. “It wasn’t easy to come up with a mission that was this authentic.”
After a few half-hearted concepts for a charity, Sobel’s mind flashed back to those hospital waiting rooms she’d spent so much time in—and it occurred to her who needed the most help.
“How much more unfortunate can you be than a parent who is losing a child to a grave illness?” she asked herself.
She found the answer in her memories of the single mothers who’d waited beside her. “There are those who cannot pay their rent, and cannot be with their children,” she says. “There are horrible choices that single parents are forced to make.”
