This week is Mitochondrial Disease Awareness Week, which is a cause very dear to Annette's heart. Annette's daughter Elizabeth passed away back in 2013 from mitochondrial disease. Every year, during the third week of September the mitochondrial disease community comes together to bring awareness and educate others on this rare genetic disease. MitoAction is a nonprofit organization which started in 2005 from a New England support group. During the awareness week, MitoAction encourages others to participate in and organize various events. For Wednesday, which is the release day of this podcast, they are supporting "Light a Light for Mito" which is held to remember your loved ones lost to mito. Please be sure to wear your #greenformito, join our Facebook event and share your light and loved one's photo memory on our event page "discussion" wall. For other Mitochondrial Disease Awareness Week events, please check out MitoAction's page here.

Mito-Mom

This week's podcast episode features another "mito-mom" – Maria Hopfgarten. Maria was also one of Annette's first podcast guests back in 2019. You can listen to that podcast episode here. Maria is a blogger, author, President of the nonprofit Miracles for Mito, wife and mom to daughter Sarah and Jacob. Maria just released her first book, "Letters to Jacob: Grieving the Loss of a Child", which is based on letters she wrote to her son Jacob after he passed away from mitochondrial disease back in 2016. Annette and Maria speak about coping with grief and how Maria's blog about her son Jacob eventually became a book.

Letters To Jacob

Maria's blog "Moments with Jacob" started out as a way to keep family and friends advised about Jacob and how he was doing. Maria also realized that writing was very therapeutic for her and helped her gain a perspective when there were major decisions to be made regarding Jacob's health.

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