John McNicholas lived a lot of life in his 15 short years with us. He faced each day with humor, kindness, charm and enthusiasm for the things he loved: sports, music, friends and family.

During his illness, John had an amazing attitude. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he believed this is the hand that God dealt him. He often said, "I can either be sad or live my life and hope things work out." His grace and strength touched everyone around him. We will forever let his mantra, Live Like John, guide all that we do."

We began our quest for useful, informative and life saving information. We scoured the internet, read every medical journal we could get our hands on and scheduled face-to-face meetings with the best and brightest doctors in the adult and pediatric brain tumor arena. The more we learned, the more we realized how little information existed specifically regarding pediatric – as opposed to adult-brain tumors.

John was as big as a man, yet providers of adult treatments wouldn't even consider us for inclusion in any study or trial. Though at the time we were motivated to save our son's life, after he died we realized that our quest was actually bigger than that. We made a decision to use our knowledge, connections and skills as an advocate to push for better coordination of information and the specific targeting of research money for pediatric brain tumors; we can and will get the money into the hands of the right people to maximize our chances for finding a cure and to minimize the amount of time that will take.