Valerie Fund Founders Devote Lives to Helping Others

Sue Goldstein is co-writing a book about resilience—a subject with which she and her husband, Ed, are intimately and tragically familiar.

Their youngest daughter, Valerie, died in 1976 at the age of 9, after a six-year battle with bone cancer. In 1989, the couple's other daughter, Stacy, was diagnosed with breast cancer, which took her life 12 years later at the age of 37.

"The death of a loved one is devastating," Sue writes in a blog, posted on her website last September about a special memorial service for childhood victims of cancer.  "A child's death, however, is that and more. It can be likened to a piece of flesh torn out of a parent's heart. It does not heal. That pain endures."

Yet, the Goldsteins—who have lived in Warren for 38 years—have called upon their considerable resilience over the years to help families of critically-ill children who are mired in despair, pain and uncertainty.

The couple is perhaps best known as the founders of The Valerie Fund, a not-for-profit organization they established in 1976 in Valerie's memory. The idea for the Valerie Fund was born in their living room.  It is devoted to hospital-based outpatient medical centers for children with cancer and blood disorders, something not readily available to the Goldsteins during Valerie's illness. 

According to the organization's website, there are seven Valerie Fund Children's Centers for Cancer and Blood Disorders in major hospitals in New Jersey, New York and the Philadelphia area.

"There are a tremendous amount of great people who have given," Ed Goldstein said about the ongoing fundraising efforts in Warren and elsewhere on behalf of The Valerie Fund. "We had a reason. But we can't do it alone. There are a lot of others who are doing it as a labor of love."

In 2009, the Goldsteins dedicated the Stacy Goldstein Breast Cancer Center in Stacy's memory at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, in New Brunswick, where they also established fellowships in her name. There are currently two Stacy Goldstein scholars conducting breast cancer research.

And at Overlook Medical Center in Summit, the couple helped to design and build the Stacy Goldstein Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Waiting Room—a suite, complete with kitchen (Ed is a former kitchen distributor), bath and fold-out sofas and chairs.

"In the last few days of Stacy's life, we had to sleep on the floor in the waiting room—we had to scrounge around for a gurney so that we weren't on the hard floor," Ed Goldstein said. "So Sue and I went up to the powers-that-be and we said we wanted to dedicate a room to Stacy and fix it up so that people wouldn't have to suffer any further indignities."

The Goldsteins are also involved in other charities—Ed, with the Vet2Vet program, a veterans crisis hotline that uses veteran peer counselors, and Sue, with Mom2Mom, a similiar crisis helpline, offering peer counseling to moms with special needs children.  Both helplines are run by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ).

In what little spare time they have, the Goldsteins like to read, take long walks and spend time with their 15-year-old grandson. In addition, Sue Goldstein has written a memoir called "Unexpected Lives." One review on her website says the book relates "tragic events without sounding maudlin"—an approach, she says, she had hoped to achieve.

"I tried to put humor into [my memoir]," she said. "Because there is humor in between the difficulties."

If "Unexpected Lives" is published, the Goldsteins plan to split any proceeds between The Valerie Fund and the Stacy Goldstein Breast Cancer Center.