Remembering a Daughter through a Legacy of Love
Mark and Shelley Lampf have attended Rutgers men’s basketball games for 48 years, starting with their first date, but one game was particularly meaningful. They presented a check for $250,000 to Rutgers Cancer Institute in memory of their late daughter, Stefanie Lampf Kennedy, from the foundation they created in her name to further cancer research.
Stefanie Lampf Kennedy had traveled the world, visiting more than 40 countries with a fearless passion for adventure. After graduating from Syracuse University in 2006, she had spent a year teaching in China before earning her law degree from Brooklyn Law School. She was on track to become a partner at her law firm—an honor earned by only a handful of attorneys without a Harvard degree.
She had a loving husband and three young children, ages 1, 4, and 7.
But at 39, she discovered she had a rare, aggressive form of lung cancer.
“She never smoked a day in her life,” says her mother, Shelley Lampf. “She ran marathons, ate healthy, walked everywhere. When she got sick, she called me and said, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t walk three blocks to the doctor.’ I thought she had pneumonia.”
When Stefanie was first diagnosed, her youngest was 5 months old. She lived to see his first birthday, then she died two weeks later. She did not express final wishes but told her father that she worried that her children would not remember her.
“On that day, I promised Stefanie that they will know her, that she will be remembered,” he says. “I figured the way I could do that is through a foundation.”
So they created the Stefanie Lampf Kennedy Foundation.
Courting through Basketball
No one in the Lampf family attended Rutgers University, nor was anyone treated at the Rutgers Cancer Institute. But they chose to support lung cancer research at Rutgers Cancer Institute for a couple of compelling reasons.
An accountant in Edison, New Jersey, Mark began researching various cancer research organizations to see where their money went. For the Jimmy V Foundation—named for James Valvano RC’67, the inspirational member of the Rutgers Athletics Hall of Fame who coached North Carolina State to a NCAA tournament championship in 1983 and died of cancer ten years later—he noticed a $50,000 grant to the Rutgers Cancer Institute.
The Lampfs were pleased to discover that, unlike many medical research foundations, Rutgers Cancer Institute would allocate all of their $250,000 pledge and their $150,000 charitable gift annuity to support research—under the direction of Missak Haigentz Jr., who leads the lung cancer program.
“One hundred percent of every dollar will be used for research, not for marketing or administration,” Mark says. “Dr. Haigentz is a great guy. That’s something special about Rutgers Cancer Institute. Even though Stefanie was not a patient there, we’ve never felt like a number because of the personal touch their physicians have.”
And then there’s the Lampfs’ love of Rutgers basketball.
After graduating from the University of Hartford in 1975, Mark learned about this new arena called “the RAC”—the Rutgers Athletic Center, now known as Jersey Mike’s Arena—about 15 minutes from his house, “a six-minute, one-light” ride from his office. He began going to games with his father and whoever else would join him. At one point, his companion was Shelley.
“Our first date was at a Rutgers men’s basketball game, and 48 years later, we are still going to Rutgers basketball games, men’s and now women’s,” Shelley says. “I always say if I knew then what I know now, I don’t know if I would’ve gone out with him on that first date!”
That date was on December 10, 1977, and on December 10, 1978, they married, “but we didn’t go to a game that night,” she says. “I wasn’t really into basketball, but I thought I’d want to go out with him. So here we are. We’re good for 80 games a year.”
The Foundation and the Future
Ultimately, the Lampfs plan for their grandchildren to take over the Stefanie Lampf Kennedy Foundation named after their mother and continue raising funds for lung cancer research.
“Maybe they won’t remember their mother, but they’ll know her name, and know that it’s their name too,” Mark says.
Their main motivation in establishing the foundation, Shelley says, is that no parent should have to go through what they went through.
“No parent should ever hear, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to die,’ and no parent should ever hear a child ask a nurse, ‘How will it be and how will it happen?’” she says. “I’m glad we have a foundation to help people, but I hate the reason we have it. I don’t expect to save everybody. But if the Stefanie Lampf Kennedy Foundation can help one family, we did it.”
Support Cancer Research
Please consider making a gift to the Stefanie Lampf Kennedy Foundation Lung Cancer Research Fund.
