When Mats Steen was a little boy, he loved a small ceramic fox. In his native Norway, a fox is a “reven.”
His mother, Trude, says he carried everywhere. Back then, he could still walk on his own.
He was 7 years old when a wheelchair arrived at his house. His parents anticipated he would need it soon, as his muscles weakened due to a rare condition, Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He hated the wheelchair, so it stayed in the hallway. Even though he was stumbling and falling, he didn’t want to use it. Eventually, he had to.
As an adult he was given a miniature fox as a birthday gift, something that was dear to him and that he saw every day on his living room shelf. When Mats passed away in 2014 at the age of 25, the Steens designed a gravestone with a fox carving.
A virtual version of that gravestone appears in World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) that was a big part of their son’s last eight years of life. What they didn’t know until after he died was how big of an impact he made on others while he was there.
Read on at the Source channel.
