Garrett Matthias is not your average 5-year-old, so it’s no surprise that the spunky little cancer fighter did NOT have your average obituary either.
In September of 2017, Garrett was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. And for nine long months, his parents, Ryan and Emilie, grieved the pending the loss of their sweet boy.
But Garrett didn’t want it to be sad. In fact, after attending various funerals with his family preceding his death, he didn’t want a funeral at all because everybody’s seemed so depressing.
That’s when Ryan and Emilie got a brilliant idea. They decided their son’s obituary should be as unique and quirky as Garrett, so they made a written record of many snippets of their conversations with him in the month leading up to his death.
“We’ve cried oceans of tears in the last nine months, but I think this is one of the things we can do to make his day special and not sad,” said Emilie.
After learning his cancer was, in fact, terminal in June of this year, they knew it was time to ensure Garrett was remembered just the way he wanted.
“We never necessarily talked about his funeral, so we never had the conversation with him that he was going to die, but we had a lot of conversations around, ‘When I die I want to do this,'” Emilie told WHO.
Garrett died on July 6, 2018.