A 78-year-old Toronto Maple Leafs fan from Nova Scotia has the opportunity to see his favorite team play in person tonight thanks to a charity that makes unfulfilled wishes to the elderly.
In addition, when Eric MacDonald sits down to watch the Leafs face the Boston Bruins at the Scotiabank Arena on Friday night, he will be wearing a device that will allow him to actually see the players.
MacDonald has vision problems. For over 10 years he can not see the faces of his grandchildren.
“I’ll probably be happy when I get there,” he told CTV News Your Morning before the game. “When I really get in there and see the size and number of people.”
“I would like to see Auston Matthews score two goals.”
Katie Mahoney, co-founder of the charity We Are Young, said Eric is one of 20 to 30 seniors whose wishes will come true this year. His love for his family and his struggle with his vision was what made him stand out from the other candidates.
“He’s such a big fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs and even though he can’t see, he still wanted to go see the game to hear it and be in the crowd. “He just talked to us,” he told CTV News Toronto.
Mahoney said MacDonald last saw a Leafs toy when he was 18 at a corporate event, but was in the nosebleed section.
“He joked he never got to see the game,” he told CTV News Toronto.
We Are Young partnered with a company called eSight, which donated a pair of special glasses to MacDonald to use at night. The glasses allow people with low vision and legal blindness to see with 20/20 vision.
Eric MacDonald shows off his eSight glasses on CTV News Your Morning.
MacDonald traveled to Toronto with his grandchildren and when he tried on the glasses, he saw his grandson’s face for the first time since he was nine years old.
He said that if his grandson had not spoken to him, he would not have known it was him.
“One of my youngest (grandchildren) just turned 11,” MacDonald said. “And I have never seen him until the glasses.”
After meeting MacDonald, E-Sight representatives decided to give him the glasses as a gift, knowing how difficult it would be to give him the gift of sight and then remove it.
“I do not know what to say,” he told Your Morning, adding that he was looking forward to going out and seeing the people he greeted.
Mahoney said We Are Young was filing late applications due to the pandemic. In recent years, they have been unable to fulfill some of the biggest wishes, instead of focusing on sending nearly 4,000 care packages to isolated and lonely elderly people, fulfilling “small wishes” as Mohoney put it.
The charity works mainly with donations and will soon launch a new program called “Monthly Wish Champion” that will help fund one wish a month.
