When the Best Medicine Is a Little Magic

Sabriya Bakewell was lucky, because she was such a happy child and so well-loved.

But neither love nor money could stop the leukemia that led to her death in Childrens Hospital, where she spent her last two months of life.

Sabriya had just turned 17 when she died last April 28.

And, as her father, Danny Bakewell Sr., explains: “She left a gift.” A dazzling idea that popped up from nowhere and danced around in his brain. A fantasy rooted in the terrible reality of what Sabriya had endured--and a way to ensure that Sabriya’s soaring spirit would live.

He would call it Sabriya’s Castle of Fun. It would bring joy to children who, like Sabriya, were confined to beds with nothing to focus on except pain. Kids who might not even have parents to stay and comfort them.

It would be a castle on a rolling cart, containing everything a youngster requires these days: a TV, a VCR, a compact disc player, a cassette player, a Nintendo game center--all in a unit on wheels, to be placed beside the bed and managed with “a magic wand.”

Mind you, Bakewell is a man who says he’d never thought of castles since he was 8. (He is now 46--a successful businessman, president of Brotherhood Crusade and a founding director of Black United Fund.)

What’s more, he has never manufactured anything in his life. And he is a total technological nerd. “Can’t even work a VCR,” he says, smiling in humble amazement. He still mispronounces his daughter’s favorite computer game. Intendo is what he says.

But there is no stronger will than that of a parent determined to honor a child who’s been loved and lost. “There were days when Sabriya was so drugged she was barely conscious or coherent,” he recalls. “But when she pulled out, we were there for her.” Bakewell and his wife, Aline, brought Sabriya a cassette player, so she could play her favorite music tapes. And a VCR, to play her favorite films. They got her the Super Nintendo she wanted, which diverted her when she began to brood.

“And each time I walked in with a piece of equipment, or a tape, I was conscious that most other kids had nothing to lift them out of their misery. Their parents had to work and take care of the other kids at home. So the children on Sabriya’s floor would just lie there listlessly, watching a shared TV tuned to something they didn’t really like.

“I realized that kids today don’t want NBC. They want MTV. They don’t want ‘Movie of the Week’ but whatever is in the theaters. They want to play rap music and computer games.”

Sabriya had all of that and more. And after she died, Bakewell promised himself the others would have it, too--in her memory. Bakewell asked an architect friend to draw models of a happy castle. He called in others to help design the unit and the cart.

He raised funds: Hughes Aircraft sponsored the manufacture of the prototype. Rapper Ice-T donated $25,000 for units, which cost about $3,000 each. Arco gave $10,000; Panda Inn Restaurants, $7,500; architect Earl Gayles, $10,000.

Before the end of 1992, Bakewell donated 10 units to the 34-bed hematology/oncology unit at Childrens Hospital, where Sabriya spent her final days.

Nurse Manager Susan Santner says Sabriya’s Castles of Fun have changed her young patients’ lives. “They are wonderful--they have everything the kids need to keep themselves entertained. These children are hooked up (to chemotherapy) for long periods of time. They get isolated, lonely and depressed. The castles divert them, give them something fun to do.”

Bakewell has donated 10 more units to the children’s floor at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital. There, recreational therapist Larry Robertson says, “It takes kids’ minds off their physical condition. It makes them smile and be happy,”--and that can be the greatest medicine of all.

Or, as one mother put it, while battling her son in a Nintendo game, “It helps him get through what he’s going through.”

Bakewell hopes to raise enough money to put a Sabriya’s Castle of Fun beside the bed of every hospitalized child. And then there’s the Sabriya’s Library he’s already planning to start. And Sabriya’s scented toy animals, because hospital rooms don’t smell that good. And as Bakewell’s list goes on, Sabriya’s spirit lives.