about

Myra Sack earned a B.A in government with All-American Honors in 2010 from Dartmouth College, where she captained the women’s soccer team and co-founded Athletes United, a student-led initiative to connect local children with Dartmouth student-athletes through a cost-free sports league and holistic mentoring program. A post-graduate fellowship allowed her to launch the Latin American arm of Soccer Without Borders in Granada, Nicaragua.

Myra’s lifelong passion for sports and social justice brought her to SquashBusters, Inc., in Boston in 2013. Since then, she has served in a variety of roles at this pioneer organization for the urban squash and education movement that reaches thousands of young people around the world through long-term extracurricular squash, academic, and social-emotional programming. She is currently SquashBuster’s Senior Advisor, and previously the Chief Program and Strategy Officer, focusing on strategic growth and impact, curriculum creation, staff development, and cross-site program quality. She was awarded an MBA in Social Impact from Boston University in 2018. She is also the Project Director for E-Motion, a program she designed that integrates movement and grief to support coping capacity. Myra has been inducted into the Lower Merion High School Hall of Fame in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, where she serves as a board member.

Myra’s life changed when her first daughter, Havi Lev Goldstein, was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a terminal neurodegenerative disorder, on December 17, 2019. Havi passed away on January 20, 2021. In 2021, Myra and Matt began supporting Courageous Parents Network, a Boston-based nonprofit organization and educational platform that “orients, empowers, and accompanies families and providers caring for children with serious illnesses.” Myra is also trained as a Certified Compassionate Bereavement Care facilitator by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, the founding director of Selah Carefarm and the MISS Foundation, and began writing a memoir to share the story of Havi’s illness and passing and the aftermath. Myra’s writing focuses on the beauty and pain that can be found in loss and the power of community to sustain and uplift those who are suffering. Her first article on her experience, “A Mother’s Letter on the Passing of Her Young Daughter,” was published on UpWorthy.com in January 2022, and quickly reached over 2.7 million viewers.

Myra’s husband, Matthew Goldstein, holds an MD, PhD in Immunology from Stanford University, and has contributed significantly to this memoir. His voice, as a father, husband, and physician-scientist, is an essential one.

Myra lives with her husband Matt and their second daughter, Kaia Goldstein, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.