A Place Closer to Mattie

Two years after losing the last of her kids, Jeni Stepanek and the disease that claimed them are moving on

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Mattie's Mom
Jeni Stepanek, mother of the late Mattie Stepanek, prepares to leave the condo she shared with her son. Mattie was a young boy whose poetry charmed Oprah, Jimmy Carter and the world. His mother, Jeni, is now dying of the same disease that claimed her son in June of 2004 as well as three more of her children.

Their place is nearly empty now. The boxes are sealed, the walls blank.

The photos have all come down -- framed snapshots of Mattie J.T. Stepanek with the stars he called friends: Oprah, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Lewis, Larry King.

Down, too, came the boy's vast collection of books, and the rhyming dictionary and Latin text he kept next to his computer. His board games are packed away. So are his big green monster claws and rock collection, his baseball caps and favorite stuffed animal.

Tomorrow, his mother is moving. Jeni Stepanek is leaving the Rockville condo purchased with the proceeds from her son's best-selling "Heartsongs" poetry books and where, for Mattie's final years, they lived together until he died two Junes ago at age 13.

He died of the same muscle-wasting disease that had already claimed Jeni's three older children and was diagnosed in her 14 years ago. It has since bent her body into a wheelchair and left her arms nearly useless. She cannot lift a frozen dinner into the microwave. Only barely can she stretch to run a comb through her hair. When she tours the country, selling Mattie's books, she can sign them on his behalf, but she cannot lift them from her lap.

The latest book tour is winding down, and the movers will be coming Monday. Jeni has finally dismantled her son's room. Every other time she packed up and moved after a child died, "I still had a living child. This is really hard."

Yet this move promises to bring her son closer: Her new house faces the 26.2-acre Mattie J.T. Stepanek Park, dedicated earlier this year by the city of Rockville. A statue of the boy will be erected soon. People often tell her they can sense Mattie's spirit, feel his presence.

Jeni listens helplessly, even angrily.

Because all she feels, she says, is "Mattie's absence."

* * *

He was the nation's boy poet and celebrated peacemaker.

Former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter eulogized Mattie at his Wheaton funeral, calling him "the most extraordinary person whom I have ever known." Mattie's doctor called him a cheerful prankster who "really did put apple juice in the urine cup and then drink it." Inside the child-size coffin draped with a blue United Nations flag, Mattie carried his remote-control whoopee cushion. Throughout the standing-room-only service at St. Catherine Laboure Catholic church, which seated 1,350 mourners, hundreds of leather-vested Harley riders and blue-uniformed firefighters twitched their jaws and tried to keep their eyes from tearing.