Matt Leffler gets to graduate, plans to ‘live life’
Sweet Home alumnus gets standing ovation for message of fairness and gratitude
People have been telling Matt Leffler that life is unfair. The young man who finished the year knowing he had a tumor in his gut that would kill him, took the graduation stage Friday evening to give the last speech, and told the packed auditorium that those people were wrong.
He said he was lucky to have so many friends among the 320 Sweet Home High School graduates gathered in the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts.
“When I look at my life I feel that it is fair,” said Matt, who returned to school in January after missing the first semester, sick with chemotherapy treatments that he gave up after surgeons found the cancer was too embedded to remove.
“Here at Sweet Home, we’re family. . . . I’ve learned from them. I’ve learned with them,” he said, before a standing ovation of people, brushing tears from their eyes. “I feel like somewhere along the way I got cheated in my time I got to spend with them. . . . I’m a selfish person, I want to keep them all.”
Before he spoke, Matt — fighting off nausea throughout the ceremony — rooted for his classmates, leaning forward in the front row as they walked across the stage for diplomas along with an announcement of their plans to join the Army, study nursing, become pharmacists and teachers, get business degrees or learn how to fix cars.
Cancer kept him from making plans beyond his diploma.
As for Matt’s future, the announcer read from the graduate’s own note, saying only that he would “live life.”
“Matt never stops,” said Andrea Finley, who sat next to him before the ceremony started. “You do. You inspire me. . . . I learned not to complain. To be grateful for every day.”
Matt teased her that Colgate University, where she plans to study next year, is really the place where they make toothpaste. Then he put his arm around her.
The warm exchange was typical of the year that has gone by since stomach pains turned out to be a kind of cancer tumor that often strikes young men.
On his chest, beneath his graduation robe, is a new tattoo.
A knife slicing into a heart with wings is his symbol for his journey in life. It is, he said, about overcoming obstacles and about rebirth.
As everyone else plans on college, he seems at peace. He takes joy in just being with people. And staying cool and calm as people fluster around him.
“I don’t have goals. I don’t have hopes or dreams. I don’t have wants or desires. There’s nothing that I’m looking forward to. Other than graduation, I guess,” he said in the days before he walked across the stage to get his diploma. “I just like hanging out with people that make me smile.”
Many people have been surrounding him since the diagnosis in December—that the cancer cells couldn’t be cut away.
That’s when Matt gave up on chemotherapy. He had already missed the first semester of school, too sick to get out of bed. If he was going to die before he could go to college and study to be a teacher as he had hoped, he wasn’t going to miss his last semester of high school.
His friends seemed awkward at first when he came back in January with a colostomy and patchy hair, but that didn’t last.
Matt is hard to resist. Tall, thin, handsome, a tease, the 18- year-old who once played football, was a track team pole vaulter and snowboarder, has an infectious popularity.
At school’s end two weeks ago, he ended up with a 97 average, graduating with honors and an award for courage and character.
Matt thinks he knows why he sometimes seems more in demand than usual: “Once you realize it’s not going to be there forever,” he said, “you try harder to get it.”
His connection with his 19- year-old sister, Amanda, is deep. She just knows him better than anyone.
It was hard for her to see him so sick last year. She did things for him she didn’t think she’d do for anybody — emptying a vomit tray, changing a feeding tube, worrying an air bubble would get stuck.
“I’m really happy that he’s graduating,” Amanda said. “He seems to be having a really good time.”
One of his nicest times lately was at prom a couple of weeks ago. He and his date, Jamie, dressed in a sparkly black dress, were crowned king and queen as the crowd parted before them.
“So me and her started slow dancing in the middle and eventually people started dancing,” he said. “We looked pretty good.”
He got to spend a night partying with people he’s known his whole life. As he danced, he left his shirt open and the top of his tattoo peeked out. By the time Matt went to sleep, the sky was light.
And that’s all he wants to say about what happened that night.
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