Matt & Zoe Ward’s Story

Matt Ward has been part of Runway for Recovery since almost the very beginning. His daughter, Zoe Lorraine, is part of what comes next.

When Runway for Recovery was founded in 2007, Matt’s mother, Lorraine Garnett Ward, was there. Newly diagnosed with Stage IV inflammatory breast cancer, Lorraine became one of Runway’s founding board members and one of the women who helped shape this community in its earliest days.

Her family had initially been told she might have only months to live. Instead, thanks to extraordinary care at Massachusetts General Hospital, Lorraine lived for another decade. She danced on the Runway, served on its board, and returned year after year surrounded by the family she loved so fiercely.

Matt joined his mother on the runway for the first time in 2009. Over the years, Runway watched the Ward family grow around Lorraine—her husband, her three sons, their wives, and eventually her grandchildren. In 2016, they all took the stage beside her for what would become Lorraine’s final Runway.

She passed away in 2017.

Lorraine was an educator at her core. She served as Dean of the First Year Experience at Wellesley College and later became English Department Head and, as Matt describes her, the “lead grandmother” of the Fenn School. Her home was a revolving door of students, colleagues, friends and family. She had an extraordinary ability to make people feel known, accepted and loved.

Matt has carried much of that forward in his own life as a teacher at Fenn. He once shared one of Lorraine’s beliefs about what mattered most in teaching: a willingness to be open to other people and to the contradictions of a world capable of being both beautiful and terrible. It is a lesson he says he continues to think about every day.

But there is one part of Matt’s life Lorraine never got to see.

His daughter.

Zoe Lorraine Ward was born after her grandmother died. She carries Lorraine’s name even though she never had the chance to know the woman behind it.

And yet, somehow, she does.

Matt has made sure of that.

Zoe and the other grandchildren know the stories. They know Lorraine’s enormous personality, her love of family, her devotion to her students and her tendency to say exactly what she thought. And they know that when they look at the moon, Nana is there looking back at them.

Now Matt and Zoe will dance down this runway together.

Twenty years after Lorraine helped build Runway for Recovery, her son and the granddaughter who bears her name are continuing what she started.

For Matt, this runway holds memories of his mother at every turn—the woman who faced a devastating diagnosis and still found reasons to dance, who believed deeply in showing up for other people, and whose love helped shape Runway into the community it is today.

For Zoe, it is a chance to become part of a story that began before she was born.

And for Runway for Recovery, seeing the two of them together is a reminder of exactly why legacies matter.

Lorraine was there at the beginning.

Matt helped carry her story forward.

And now Zoe Lorraine gets to take it with her into the future.