How the death of a child turned Miller Park gold
Gold in September formed to fight childhood cancer
In late August 2012, at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, 10-year-old Jack Bartosz asked his mom, Sarah, if he was going to die.
Yes, she said.
Sarah told Jack that she was so very sorry. She told him that she and his dad, John, had done everything they possibly could to keep him alive. She told him that they loved him, that they didn’t want him to suffer, and that it was OK to go.
“And he said,” Sarah recalls, “I’m going to miss everyone so much.”
Jack died the next day.
Jack and his twin sister, Annie, were born in October 2001. Ten weeks premature and about 3 pounds apiece, they were nonetheless hale and hearty when Sarah and John brought them home to Hartland.
Two weeks before their fourth birthday, Jack was diagnosed with advanced neuroblastoma, a cancer that develops in immature nerve cells and whose victims are almost always kids.
Over the next nearly seven years, Annie stood by her brother as her family crisscrossed the country seeking a cure. They and group of desperate families banded together and, on their own, raised enough money to fund a promising novel treatment.
But it was too late for Jack.
It struck Annie as simply wrong that the families of sick kids would have to bear the burden of funding re-
search that might save their dying children.
It was, she told her parents, like sending the wounded in to fight a battle. Part of the problem was awareness. How come, she asked, it is that just about everyone knows that pink is the color in the rally against breast cancer and that breast cancer awareness month is October?
How come, she asked, it is that most people know that No-Shave November is about men’s health issues, bringing awareness to prostate and testicular cancer?
What color symbolizes the fight against childhood cancer? What month has been set aside for kids?
Gold.
September.
And so, at 11-year-old Annie’s urging, Sarah and John Bartosz created the Gold in September Charitable Trust, a nationwide campaign to raise awareness of childhood cancer and support the advancement of new therapies and initiatives at research centers across the country.
John, who underwent aggressive treatments for cancer when he was in his 20s, died in 2016. He was 47.
If only he could have been at Miller Park Saturday evening for a bellwether moment in Gold in September’s campaign.
More than 37,000 people had come to watch the Brewers take on the Pirates. Seated on the stadium’s first base side, in terrace box 410, were Sarah, 17year-old Annie and 5-year-old Tommy, who was born only a few months after Jack’s death.
It was Childhood Cancer Awareness Night. A video produced by Gold in September played on the stadium’s giant scoreboard, explaining the significance of the color and of the month.
Then, at the end of the fourth inning, with Miller Park’s roof open to a darkening but still blue and cloudless sky, the crowd held up colored placards, turning the stadium gold but for a band of blue with a gold ribbon at its center.
Sarah had recalled how frightened and alone she and her family had felt the day that Jack was diagnosed with cancer.
But now they were part of a great sweeping gesture of hope. And they were surrounded by a multitude.