Light feet with a heavy heart

Matthew Schaefer, last year’s No. 1 pick in the OHL draft, has dealt with two unfathomable losses

- KEN CAMPBELL

Matthew Schaeffer, pictured on the left with his mother, Jennifer, and on the right with his billet mom in Erie, Emily Matson. He lost both of them within a few months.

The thing Matthew Schaefer will remember most was how her smile could light up a room. And that laugh. By the time she finished telling a joke, she’d be laughing so hysterically that you’d find yourself laughing hysterically, too, even if the joke wasn’t all that funny.

And he’ll never forget that last kiss. She was in her bed at the Juravinski Hospital and Cancer Centre in Hamilton, disoriented and quickly deteriorating. Through his tears, Matthew asked for a kiss. Even though she had been unresponsive, she puckered up and gave him one.

He’ll remember his older brother, Johnny, asking her for her blessing to marry his girlfriend and her responding by opening her eyes and saying yes. He got to see her 91-year-old parents, his grandparents, make it to her bedside after driving nine hours from their home in Sault Ste. Marie with her brother to see her just minutes before she faded away.

Those are some of the amazing and beautiful things Matthew Schaefer experienced in February over the final days with his mother, Jennifer.

Not long after that, Jennifer Schaefer died at the age of 56, the breast cancer that had originally been diagnosed in 2021 taking her exactly one week after she was in the stands at the Erie Insurance Arena watching her son play for the Erie Otters of the Ontario Hockey League and, in a cruel twist of irony, the same day the Otters held their Hockey Fights Cancer night.

And, suddenly, a young hockey star who had lived a charmed life for 16 years and never experienced anyone close to him dying was overcome with grief.