Our 10-year-old son Ethan had one final wish: attend a real football game with Mom and Dad.<\/p>\n
His cancer had stopped responding to treatment, and doctors told us we might have far less time than expected. From that moment, I photographed everything\u2014his meals, his hospital days, even ordinary moments I was terrified of forgetting.<\/p>\n
When a wish organization asked Ethan what he wanted most, he immediately answered, \u201cA football game. With Mom and Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
At halftime, our faces suddenly appeared on the stadium\u2019s giant screen.<\/p>\n
Then the announcer told us to turn around.<\/p>\n
Walking toward us were Ethan\u2019s hospital friends, nurses, and \u201cCoach Ray,\u201d carrying Ethan\u2019s battered tabletop football game.<\/p>\n
Ethan had secretly asked that his hospital \u201cleague\u201d be included because of one rule he always had:<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody plays.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Later, in a quiet family room, Ethan finally explained why football mattered so much.<\/p>\n \u201cYou guys act different now,\u201d he said. Dad watched Ethan instead of the game. I photographed everything.<\/p>\n Then Ethan whispered:<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody keeps acting like everything has to be special because I\u2019m going to die. Sometimes I just want stuff to be stuff.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n We returned to our seats.<\/p>\n I put my phone away.<\/p>\n When our team scored, Ethan grabbed both our hands and laughed.<\/p>\n This time, we weren\u2019t preserving the moment.<\/p>\n We were simply living it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our 10-year-old son Ethan had one final wish: attend a real football game with Mom and Dad. His cancer had stopped responding to treatment, and doctors told us we might have far less time than expected. From that moment, I photographed everything\u2014his meals, his hospital days, even ordinary moments I was terrified of forgetting. When …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9523"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9525,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9523\/revisions\/9525"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}