It took seven months of chemo and more than 30 blood transfusions, so once 12-year-old Declan McLean-Pauley was officially in remission for leukemia it was time to have some fun. To that end, things had been in the works for a while: He had discussed with Make-a-Wish Australia a bizarre and wonderful request – he just wanted to “blow stuff up.”
I’m sure the Make-A-Wish rep, expecting to hear another plea for Disneyland, was taken aback by the kid’s weird, wonderful fantasy . To their immense credit, the foundation didn’t get too judgy over this particular wish and made it happen.
Realizing that sending off an unsupervised kid with explosives would probably have sent Declan and others back to the hospital for entirely new reasons, the foundation paired him up with the Australian Federal Police’s Specialist Response Group. Not only did he get to meet this group of supercops, but also get their assistance in making his destructive dream come true.
Here’s a video account of Declan’s wonderful day out:
It started with a police motorcade, which seems quaint and cute enough. Then the powers that be upped the ante exponentially by tossing Declan in with the police group for a simulated hostage situation. Because that still failed to meet the caliber of awesomeness that Declan desired, the contingency then headed out to a training village where they blew up an armored car with explosive charges.
It sounds like a memorable day for everyone involved, but most of all, Dylan. As it should have been, since he’d been planning the day with Make-a-Wish volunteers for a year while he fought off cancer.
Congrats to Declan for his big win against cancer and congrats to the foundation, who really knocked this one out of the park for a deserving recipient.
If you’d like to see more kids live out their dreams during and after their battles with illness, consider donating to the great people at Make-a-Wish who make stuff like this happen.
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
Gif of Robin Williams via
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.