A 53-year-old man named Matt Cobrink has become virally famous after a video showing him greeting his 88-year-old dad Malcolm Cobrink at the Los Angeles airport. Matt has Down Syndrome and was invited to New York City to see Aaron Judge, his favorite baseball player. He was in NYC for a week and separated from his pops, a rare occurrence since his mother passed away 25 years ago, according to People. His sister Marcy caught the reunion on her camera phone, and shared it to Facebook, where it quickly went viral.
Marcy told People that she was prepared for the sweetness of Matt’s reaction.
“I expect that kind of reaction from him,” she said. “Sometimes I won’t see him for a few days, and then I’ll go to his house or my dad will bring him over here, and he will kiss me like 20 times. He’s just really very loving and happy to see everybody!”
The video was also reposted by Twitter account The Dad, where it got hundreds of comments, many of them from parents of children with Down Syndrome explaining that their kids are always warm, loving, and sunny, just like Matt appears to see when greeting his father:
Henry.. pic.twitter.com/uFT7fvyqkj
— Double Naught Spy (@JamesSandzik) September 3, 2018
And now he’s 21, an Eagle Scout, high school graduate, theatre performer, and waiter at local pizza restaurant.
Only thing we have that they don’t is that we don’t have Down Syndrome.
— David Botwick-Ries (@dbotwickries) September 3, 2018
So wonderful and so utterly beautiful it is to love and be loved by a child with Down Syndrome, even when you make them get out of that pool to eat pic.twitter.com/SdFoGZupbx
— bruce barket (@brucebarket) September 3, 2018
The Cobrinks are thrilled to see the positive response from everywhere. Marcy says that being able to share a sweet, simple moment from their family and have it well-received is huge.
“People all over the world were sending me pictures of their children with Down Syndrome, telling me that it made them cry, that they’re so happy to see such a long, loving relationship between my father and my brother,” she explained. “It gives them hope for their children or they have a cousin who has Down Syndrome. And that it’s so nice to see something that’s happy instead of things that are negative.”
She continued, “We just want to share the love. We want to let people know that it’s really not Down Syndrome, we call it ‘Up Syndrome,’ because my brother has brought so much love into everybody’s life that he comes in contact with. It’s just really remarkable.”
This is the kind of loving relationship we all actually want to see flaunted on social media.