The Pizza Angel in the SICU
How one kind act changed a grieving mother's life
Never underestimate the power of a pizza.
My youngest son Chandler was hit by a car on December 15, 2018. The waiting room for the SICU (Surgical Intensive Care Unit) became our family’s new living room. Friends popped in and out, coffee in hand, often bearing bags of food to share with us. We did what you do in waiting rooms. Wait.
One night as our collective stomach growls threatened to wake the entire SICU, several boxes of hot pizza showed up in the waiting room. Just for us! It was like manna from heaven. Apparently, there is a pizza angel, and he or she had decided we needed the crispy crust and the melty cheese and, yes, the pepperoni.
Desiring to extend our gratitude for said manna, I launched an investigation into the pizza angel’s identity and learned that a man named Martin Dugard had anonymously sent the pizza to our family.
When I contacted Mr. Martin Dugard, I learned why.
Martin knew Chandler.
Martin was a regular at a local restaurant, Board & Brew, where Chandler worked. He and Chandler had struck up a friendship. Chandler knew that Martin was a writer, a good one, of the New York Times Bestselling sort. During their conversations, Chandler told Martin he wanted to become a writer and asked him how to go about it. Martin graciously shared his knowledge with Chandler.
That single exchange with author and good human Martin Dugard changed my life in ways I couldn’t even know yet. Learning from Martin—a stranger who had become his friend— that Chandler wanted to be a writer was like the revelation of a piece of my son I didn’t know existed.
On January 1, 2019, Chandler took his last breath. And I kept writing.
Without that pivotal conversation with Martin Dugard, I may have continued writing here and there because, quite honestly, it helped me process the pain of losing Chandler. And I definitely would have been motivated to continue writing every time someone told me that my words were helping them in some way. But every single day for the first year after Chandler’s death?
I’m the inspiration for the children’s book If You Give a Moose a Muffin. So for me to commit to doing anything every single day for a year, besides go to the bathroom and brush my teeth, it has to be mandated by God and the IRS. And to actually follow through and do the thing every day for a year? That requires a level of attention, persistence, determination, and resolve that doesn’t show up casually in my DNA.
But I did it. I did it because of Martin’s words to me. I did it for Chandler. I did it with Chandler, the writer. There were so many days the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and write more words about life without Chandler. And I could hear his voice—Mom, you’ve got this.
My year of daily writing became my book First, Brush Your Teeth—Grief and Hope in Real Time. When it came time to put a name on the cover of my book, there was no one I felt more honored to have there than the Pizza Angel who told me who my son wanted to be.
And all of it because a compassionate, generous person sent pizza to a hungry family in a SICU waiting room.
Author’s note: Martin Dugard’s new book, The Long Run, releases Tuesday, April 14th.