STONY BROOK — While battling metastatic breast cancer or leukemia, it helps to have something to look forward to, like a major league ball game or a piece of cheesecake. 

That is the philosophy of Rob Graziani, the chairman and president of the Anne V. Graziani Fund, a small nonprofit on Long Island.

Graziani knows, because the namesake of the organization, his mother, Anne, spent the final days of her 12-year fight with breast cancer enjoying life as best she could. 

She watched the final Islanders hockey game in Nassau County Coliseum and dined at her favorite restaurants, like the Cheesecake Factory. And on June 14, 2016, she proudly donned a Mets hat for the team’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Citi Field. 

“So,” Graziani recalled, “we’re coming down from the elevator, and a guy goes, ‘Ma’am, you look official.’ And she got the biggest smile on her face. That was priceless. 

“And I thought, ‘If I got the chance to pay this forward, I will.’ ” 

Graziani subsequently established the fund to bring live entertainment — such as sporting events and other uplifting experiences — to cancer patients, many of them children, undergoing active treatment.  

For example, the fund helped arrange for 12-year-old Joseph McDaniel, who is fighting leukemia, to throw out the first pitch at a recent Long Island Ducks game at Fairfield Properties Park in Central Islip. 

The future hurler, who goes by his middle name, Payton, is a seventh grader at St. Patrick Catholic School in Bay Shore. He said leukemia has not only made him very sick, but it has also kept him from the school he loves.  

He’s regaining his strength, spending more time at school, and has even participated in some sporting events. Still, he said with seriousness uncharacteristic of a 12-year-old, “It’s difficult.” 

That is why, he said, the opportunities offered by the Anne V. Graziani Fund are a blessing. 

“I felt special,” Payton said of throwing the first pitch at the Ducks’ game. “I felt selected. I felt like I was the only one.” 

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Graziani said he founded the organization to memorialize his mother, who died on Sept. 4, 2016, just eight days before her 84th birthday. 

But he also wanted to honor her legacy of faith and compassion, which he knew firsthand, having been adopted by her as an infant in 1980 from an orphanage in Calcutta, India. 

Her own life was filled with adversity. As a child in the Bronx, polio paralyzed her from the waist down, yet she managed to graduate from high school and college and find employment. 

She also learned to drive a car with special controls for people who are unable to use their legs. She traveled the world and became active in the Church through the Knights of Columbus’ Columbiettes.  

Graziani’s mother was in her 40s when she married his father, Robert Sr., whom she met through the Knights. But the couple was unable to have a child of their own, so they decided to adopt from an orphanage in India. 

“It was inspired by Mother Teresa,” Graziani said, “and it worked with a whole bunch of orphans left in hospitals, or their parents couldn’t take care of them. It had nuns, and they would take care of you to the point where you would get adopted.” 

Graziani said that growing up in Stony Brook on Long Island, his parents raised him in the Catholic faith. 

“I felt people always looked out for each other,” he said. “There were always people who helped, and always people who remembered you.” 

Graziani’s father died in 1995, and his mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. 

But despite more paralysis caused by the cancer, she kept fighting, reinforcing the tenets of the fund. 

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Graziani noted that cancer treatments can cause people to lose their ability to work and pay bills. Consequently, he added, the thought of diversionary recreation becomes a distant memory. 

But the Anne V. Graziani Fund gives people something to look forward to amid their cancer treatments, which links to their Catholic faith. 

“Definitely, these are acts of service to help people,” he said. “So many times, people wait to be helped. You never know what they’re going through.  

“It gives a moment of respite away, and it creates that momentum.”