Dr. Maddie Giegold is someone who brought cheer and healing to those around her. Her life is an inspiring reminder of the good we can do in this world in the time we have. Maddie suffered from a stroke in July 2024 at the age of 32. Below is a celebration of life video from the local news channel in Fresno where Maddie was finishing her residency.
Maddie was an avid trail runner and outdoor enthusiast. The podcast video below is an interview from April 2024.
From the video description: “Today, Katie Asmuth is joined by Maddie Giegold. Maddie is a chief emergency medicine resident at UCSF and also a trail runner. She is passionate about wilderness medicine and event medicine. She loves trail running, gravel cycling, jumping into cold bodies of water, sleeping outdoors, flowers, and double-fisting ice cream. She is also a junior ranger at 19 national parks and wilderness areas.” [Source]
More about Maddie is on the page setup to raise funds for her family and on the ABC 30 news website in a post about her from 1 Aug 2024. [Read More]
Maddie’s husband, Matthew Taylor, had the following words to share in a post on 6 Aug 2024 thanking those who have helped support their family through donations.
Hi folks,
First of all, Thank You. I’m a rambler, southern-born and raised, so before I go off-topic, the most important thing I can say over-and-over to you is thank you.
I am just starting to be able to look at the GoFundMe. For anyone who’s had the experience, it’s an odd thing to exist, funds and grief, together. Lots of questions surround me at this time. Death seems to confirm that, there just aren’t always answers.
I saw there was an option to update here, and I’ll tell you that the process of a spouse, a loved one, a partner, dying is a drawn out affair. There was never any reason to expect this to happen, and it shouldn’t have. But through a cataclysm of natural causes, it did.
Hug your friends, your family, animals, and talk about death. Maddie and I did, and not infrequently. It helped me in a time when I could no longer speak to her.
Instead of tangents, I just need to reiterate, sincerely, thank you. I envisioned our lives about to open up wide to the world, we were days from, what we thought, the start of our biggest adventure, moving to a new city after her residency and finally exploring the freedom outside of med school and residency for Mads. Now it’s something else. She’s now free to see the universe, she’s the flower dancing in the sunshine. The tree at your back as you sit and rest. She’s definitely also squealing with you for every cute dog-o and cat you see.
When we talk about Mads, we’re often laughing because she just exuded goodness, presence, insatiable hunger for joy. We all can’t be Mads, some of us have to be the curmudgeons. Curmudgeons were Maddie’s favorite. She was wild. There’s love in you, and there’s love to find, everywhere. Thank you.
Document History
Yesterday, on 8 Aug 2024, the video about Maddie from ABC news showed up in my YouTube feed. I thought her story was inspiring so I decided to create this web page/post in honor of her life. The message from her husband, Matthew, was also very touching. It’s a sad story, but it also gets one’s attention and makes you stop and reflect about the uncertainty of life and living life to the fullest. I felt that Maddie’s story was important to share.
Today, while walking at a park, midway through my walk, I thought I’d listen to the audio of this page/post using the text to speech feature in the Google Pixel phone that can read web pages. It was a beautiful cool, breezy, sunny day. So, I was walking along, and listening, with my own thoughts meandering a little. I’d been taking pictures. After a while before me were some beautiful flowers moving in the breeze and sunlight. I framed the shot, and as I took the picture, these words were being spoken from Matthew’s writing above: “she’s the flower dancing in the sunshine.”
I stopped and looked at the flowers before me that seemed to be dancing in the sunshine. It was a synchronicity moment.
When I first read Matthew’s words yesterday, I read it as imaginative poetry… because flowers don’t really dance, right? Yet seeing the flowers moving in the wind, they looked like they were dancing, and they were illuminated with the bright summer sun. In that moment, the experience was like having her presence before me.
Below is a video of the flowers. It concludes with the photo I took of them. These types of moments, if we notice them, we usually don’t share. Yet, I felt this may be meaningful to someone. It was to me.