Wow! Matthew would have loved to see the chapel this full when he was up here preaching, that's for sure. This was one of his favorite places to be.
But a little bit more about Matthew his name means gift of God and that was truly what he was for us we had many years of trying to have a son or a child I should say and finally Matthew was born in October 1983 we were thrilled but so was his grandma Arsha Louise and my parents Herman and Millie they were all thrilled and so were his godparents George and Arpi Banerian. We had all been hoping for a child and then he came, and he was the light of our lives. But Matthew still wanted more so a few years later Jeffrey was born and then he had a brother, and he was thrilled to have a brother but a little bit after that he decided that he wanted a sister so he prayed for a sister and then Lauren came and our family was complete
He was one of those kids that always tried to learn when he was young, he'd hide under his bed looking at books you know reading books and he had this fascination with Dinosaurs when he was 3 years old, he actually taught himself how to read. At first, I thought he was just you know memorizing the books, but actually he could recognize the words of dinosaur names, and it was at that time we said Well, he's obviously going to be a scientist.
Yeah, and the three of them just kept growing together, they were inseparable as they were growing up, they loved each other deeply, they did everything together, they played games, they created games, they built puzzles. And later on, in life one of Anna’s favorite stories is about the two of them. We had bought Matthew a chemistry set and gave it to them and they kind of disappeared into the garage for a little while and when Matthew comes back with one of her nice spoons and it's kind of all black and discolored and he says "we've changed it and we made it better mom".
That bond that they had just kept growing and as they got older and older they got closer and closer together. It was always amazing to me that the three of them were so inseparable there were times that I would find that they just met up with each other somewhere in Southern California somewhere because they were all there, they were all traveled you know 50 miles 100 miles just to get together with each other.
And while he really loved family, he also loved School. One of his favorite things was going to school and this is something special for a kid of his age but, he loved to learn. All of his teachers used to comment on what he was and how much fun it was to have a student in their class that liked to learn as much as Matthew did he was always going after learning new things reading books learning you know at the highest pace that he could possibly be learning at.
So while academics was his strength Sports was not necessarily as strong as that was he loved playing soccer but he wasn't very good at it he was one of those people that would kind of follow along with the ball but never actually trying to touch it but he was one of the best things about him with soccer was and he was on a lot of losing teams he was always good at motivating the team after the game was over after their loss and trying to inspire them to do a little better the next time but because of that love for the game he developed a kind of a series a way of talking to people about teamwork in spirits and cooperation when he was going to school too he aside from his academics he always in involved with the highest classes AP classes honors classes he took all of those highest classes always looking to be better or the best at what he could do and really excelled at learning these addition things it was during this time.
when he had started High School where he was first diagnosed with cancer at 15 and we said okay you know you've got to slow down you've got to stop taking all these classes because you know you're going through chemo it's a 3-week cycle it it's very intense it's very involved but he said no he wanted to keep doing it he had some friends that stuck by him during that time and he managed to stay in all of his AP and honors classes graduate with his class with everyone there and did that the two years that he was in chemo also during this time he stayed in marching band and he played with marching band getting up early in the morning sometimes I would get scolded by an because the chemo treatments took a lot out of him and he would still want to go to go to band and so I would take him to band he would get there the marching band totally exhausted him and he would have to spend the next three days resting up and Anna kind of used to look at me and say why did you do that and it was kind of one of those things that marching band is a group activity you can't practice marching band on your own you could learn stuff on your own but you can't do marching band alone.
At the end of all this treatments and everything he still had a very bad back so he could no longer play any kind of contact sport so he took up badminton in in high school and he was kind of one of those the most inspirational player on the team he loved the he loved the game it was something that didn't really require a great deal of athletic ability and he excelled at it and his coach even at that time gave him essentially the most inspirational player award because he just m he said Matthew is one of the best people he used to see love to watch him play and he was always inspirational to the other players he continued playing badminton and playing with the B marching man all through High School and even during that time when he was in school he was in the Scouts he earned his Eagle bet Meritage and in the Scout program you have to get your Eagle badge when you're 18 by the time you're 18 you disqualify for it but for somebody who's had a serious disease like Matthew had they extend that and basically your qualification period goes to the point of when you started and stopped your treatment for this disease so he actually had till 19 if he wanted to but, being Matthew in his way of looking at things he said no I have to do this by the time I'm 18 because that's what everyone else has to do so he did that he got his eagle and his Arrow by the time he was 18 after high school he was accepted to lots of different colleges he wound up going to UCLA and because of all his honors and AP classes he wound up going there as a sophomore he started in his sophomore year and he still continued to do marching band there he loved marching band we loved watching him we would go to the see him at the Rose Bowl he'd come here to play Stanford or in Berkeley and we'd be able to watch him in the whole watching band play there he was living the great he was living the life he wanted to live he had a great time with school with academics and with marching band in the middle of all this he was actually pronounced cured from his original cancer this was in 2003 which was 5 years after he had ended treatments so that's when they consider you cure so he was completely he was determined to be cured from cancer at that time and he lived cancer-free for the next 25 years it was during this time at UCLA that he became a Christian at that time he decided that he was going to dedicate his life to Christ and he made the decision then at UCLA to receive Christ as his Lord and Savior and that was a decision he made on his own with his conscience and with God's guidance and that was something that kept staying with him that that commitment that he made at that time basically made all the decisions for the rest of his life his decisions to serve and to follow God's work and to follow Jesus was that that day or that period of time at um and he heard the calling to help so he got into this back then he joined some missionary groups and it first the missionary groups were helping to feed the Homeless they were helping to you know shelter people during the bad weather and then he got involved with KY Alpa and they started expanding he was no longer staying in La he was making trips to Haiti and to Vietnam and they were going around the world to spread the word of God to teach the gospel and especially he loved going to Haiti for some reason that the Haiti people the children the orphans he loved to go there he loved to teach them he would go there with full suitcases Fe go I need more suitcases for Haiti and he'd go there with like four or five suitcases just filled with all the clothes or toys or science projects that he could get and he would go there and he would teach them he bring the clothes to them he'd bring the science project one time he brought them little water filter systems because he discovered that they were not having enough good clean water in Haiti so he made this his mission there was to teach them to help them and it was committed to especially to the children there and while he was doing all this missionary work and making these trips and playing in marching band he earned his bachelor's degree then he went on he got his master's degree and then his PhD so in other words he was able to do all this stuff still get all these degrees and his PhD thesis was actually in diagnostics for cancer kind of ironic for him but it was one of the things that he had a passion in and he was doing a lot of work with identifying and trying to cure cancer or at least trying early on it was just to detect cancer not to cure it but then they eventually found out that they could method that they were using to detect cancer could possibly lead to a way of curing it or killing the cancer but at that point in time UCLA said you know you've been here a long time it's time for you to move on we this project we want to give to other graduate students so they so they gave him his hood I guess you call it and sent him on his way and they were going to let other students next level of graduate students take over for that but after that time he was officially called Dr Silverman and that was a major thing for him so he returned to the Bay Area I think with a lot of incentive from nurses to help the bring the youth back to the church and then and he started teaching at San Francisco State University the clinical art The Clinical Laboratory Sciences program and he start he was training hundreds of students to actually be able to do medical Diagnostics and that was kind of one of the key things for him he was still back in medicine he was still back trying to find ways to help people and cure people he bought a home in Daily City which was a total got job he loved tearing it down to nothing and it was just like studs left and then in the studs we found wires and we said well these wires aren't any good so we had to take the wires out too um so now we had new wires and then we looked at the pipes and the pipes were no good so we had new Plumbing put in so I think by the time he was all done with it maybe the driveway was the only thing that was in the original condition but then The Daily city was kind of a for those people that know the Bay Area Daily city is always in the fog so people like Anna hates to go there because of her hair she goes it's I'm going to have a bad hair day here and she and I said well Matthew deals with it just fine but and he started to get more reach AC with the church here and he loved this church he loved the youth in this church when Co hit he became a voice of reason he loved to teach people he loved to explain about the disease he learned to take the information that was being published by all these scientific sites and universities and turn it into something that actually everyday people could understand and read so he was answering questions he was doing all that and then then his life started to take a new Direction there was this woman at church who wasn't coming to church that often anymore because she was having some sickness and problems with vertigo and with migraines and so he started calling her and talking to her a little bit now first it was on the phone then it was a little bit more conversations and it was further and then during this period of time Lura and him started what was probably the only love affair that I know that didn't have any dating associated with it at all but so their relationships kept was growing but in the background he was having these abdominal pains for a long period of time with covid going on you couldn't see doctors that often they were not always available you were doing video calls and this was an internal thing so by the time they actually were able to diagnosis condition it had gotten to a stage four intestinal cancer which normally is just a few month kind of disease you know we you don't really have a good chance of it but he believed he would beat it he would he did everything he could he went through all the treatments he didn't complain with all these very harsh treatments and all the chemo cycles that he went through and during this time Lara was by his side they grew in their relationship kept growing and during this time while he was in pain while he was in suffering he never complained he never gave up on his faith in God he always con was convinced that there was a higher purpose in his life that he didn't maybe understand but that he that was there so during this period of time he kept working he kept believing in Christ he never through all the suffering but he always was able to sustain himself he was always able to focus on the better things the bigger picture he was always concerned for other people and but after a few years of this being treated and sometime Laura I remember him telling me you know Mom was in a bad mood one day and he goes do you think I'd cheer her up if I told her that she could start planning a wedding and so I said yeah that might work that might work so he started to make plans and the big thing was going to be on Lara's birthday so he had the whole thing planned out everybody knew about it except for Lara I think but on that day he asked her to marry him and she gave an Armenian yes which I wasn't sure what that meant but everyone else did. Then in March of last year (2023) they got married and it was definitely the event of the season for this church, and the event of a lifetime for us and definitely the happiest day of Matthew's life. And their lives together began. The devotionals and YouTube videos that Matt had been making for years became joint theatrical productions and I will talk about that soon. As his disease progressed everyone in the family all came to his side, and the church rallied around him and our finally after 3 years of this battle and not in the in towards the end not being able to eat or drink he made the decision that he just had to stop treatments going to hospice care and leave everything in God's hands at that time and I think it was hard for him it was hard for him not for himself it was hard for him for all the other people that he was concerned with so Matt's life was always concerning about others and how others would react so he was mostly concerned with what would happened after he was gone not for him but for those that he was leaving behind so during that period of time he decided that you know once he came to our house the beginning we had a bunch of people then kind of towards the end he said he wanted to do a couple more devotionals and here's somebody who can you know barely speak but he invited the church youth over and I think we must have had 30 or 40 people from the church there and he was giving his last sermon to all these kids and he gave them the basically the inspiration that he wanted them to carry on to move forward for somebody else to pick up the torch and run with it so that was kind of his final message to the church which was and to the Youth of the church which is find God find your passion and find a way to help other people with it so he really truly believed in that he believed in family he believed in all these values that we talk about he wanted to leave a legacy to the world to the people and he did this by teaching science he did this by teaching God's word but his but his real passion was essentially spreading the gospel so during this time in it was something that he had done starting almost a decade ago he started to create these devotionals and the first ones were on median they were all just text devotionals that he wrote I think his first one was from 2014 or 2015 and he kept doing these devotionals as time went on he made them more involved he got into YouTube he started to make YouTube videos with them and the YouTube videos originally were just him talking and then they got into stick figures then they got into a little bit of animation and before long we had scenes from Batman and other of his favorite action movies and he always seemed to be able to weave these things into one of his tales so he's made over 100 maybe 125 by last count of these devotionals that that are on YouTube and on median and I think these are these are important way that he basically can leave a legacy to people these are just as important now as they were back when he created them so I think one of the things that I'm looking to do is to make sure that we can keep this this Legacy alive for him even in his final days he wanted to still listen to and preach now at this time it was just down to the CORE family Lauren and Jeff and me and cousin Joey was there sometimes but we would he would say let's put on a Bible verse so Jeff would pull out his computer and Jeff became an expert at finding Bible verses on the computer and we' play the verse and then we would discuss it and Matthew had a chance to give his final you know his input as to what he felt that b meant and his interpretation of it so it was kind of a way that he kept his teaching he kept his preaching he kept his faith in God and in Jesus right till the end so he's gone now but we do have all these things to remember him by and he's hoping now that for all the youth in this church that everyone who's he's taught everyone who's been impacted by him will now pick up the torch and run with it and do something for other people but he was truly our gift from God