In the early 1990s, a young girl named Mallory Cyr, from a small town in Maine, was living with a rare condition that made it almost impossible for her body to take in food the usual way. She was just a kid, facing something most grown adults couldn’t begin to imagine.
Her classmates wanted to help. So they did the only thing a room full of schoolkids could think of. They wrote letters, in crayon and marker, to the most famous man in the world, Michael Jackson, and asked him to help their friend.
Nobody really expected anything back. You don’t, when you drop a child’s letter into that kind of void.
But Michael wrote back. To Mallory, personally.
Michael quietly visiting sick children (archive footage)
If that sounds out of character for a global superstar, it really wasn’t. The footage above shows the kind of quiet hospital visits he made all the time, well away from the cameras. In his letter to Mallory he wrote, I am sending you all my loving and caring, Mallory, along with the enclosed gift. That gift was a donation to help her family through an impossibly hard stretch, and he never once publicized the amount. He just sent it and moved on.
More of his hospital visits, away from the cameras
Mallory grew up. She survived. And today she spends her life as an advocate for other young people living with disabilities and complex medical conditions, taking the kindness she once received and turning it into a whole career of handing it back out.
One sick kid. A pile of crayon letters. And a superstar who actually took the time to answer. If Michael Jackson could stop and write to a child he had never met, it’s worth wondering what excuse the rest of us have.