Today I had the great opportunity to speak to college students pursing mass media and journalism degrees in their hopes of careers around the mass media fields. I was honored to be asked and even more honored to know they have been following my blog site for the past year. Just graduating from college myself a few short months ago I found it refreshing and exciting to share some of those experiences with these students. Their eagerness to learn more, to reach out for more knowledge and more life experiences, reminded me of how much I will miss not going back to campus this fall. I so enjoyed my four years of college and found myself envious of the students sitting before me.
When their college professor asked me if I would speak to these students I did not hesitate to accept his invitation. We were attending the same conference, packed wall to wall with inspiring journalist who are trying to get a jump on their field of interest. I am trying to get closer to publishing Gracie and my story of her life on earth and the short time she was here. I was sure when he told me his students have been following my blogs that it was the story of Gracie they wanted to visit with me about. While we did visit the topic of the Amazing Gracie blogs, it would be one single blog that they would choose to discuss with me.
Legends Never Die would be the chosen blog. You can follow that link to refresh your memory of the blog in its entirety but to sum it up for you briefly it is about a friend who lost his best friend in an untimely death and the pain it left in his heart. It is the fifth most popular and read blog on my BlogSpot with almost 5000 reads. It is the first non-Gracie blog in number of emails I have received from our blog followers. It is the most shared blogged I've written and it has been read in 16 different countries, translated in many languages. I was not surprised that this is the blog that the majority of these students wanted to discuss.
There were 23 students before me as we started our discussion. The first question I was asked regarding this blog was "How were you able to capture the pain in such a manner that the reader could not just feel that pain, but put themselves in the position to understand that pain as if it was them who lost their best friend in such a tragic manner".
My friend Keri in Omaha once said something along the lines "until you have experienced the loss of a loved one, you have no idea how much it hurts". That is exactly how I answered the question before me. I carry the pain of loved ones gone with me every day. It is there when I wake up, it is there when I go to bed. I have lost many people in my life who meant so much to me. They all occupied a piece of my heart when they were here and in their passing the memory of them remained inside my heart. It is a pain that is as unexplainable as why bad things happen to good people. It puts life in a new perspective for you. You see the world differently, you function differently, you are never the same as you were before the death you are facing, the loss of a loved one.
It never gets easier, and it never goes away. The more people you lose to death, the more you accept it, but you do not understand it any better. You find ways to go on, to convince yourself you are ok, it will be alright. You justify your loss as someone else's gain. You buy into the whole reasoning that this is God's plan, that God needs your loved one now. That they are in a better place and one day we will see them again. The pain you feel is real. Like the wind you cannot see it but you can feel it. When the wind blows to hard you find a way to shield yourself from it, just like when the pain becomes unbearable you find ways to push it deep inside you to avoid it, but it is still there.
Another question that surfaced was regarding my explanation of how when you lower the casket you are planting a seed and that seed is the legend that lives forever. "Where did you come up with the explanation about planting a seed?" That was not as easy to explain but I used the death of my brother Joey to explain myself.
My biggest fear of all is that as time moves on the people in my life will forget about my brother Joey's life, before he died. That he will eventually be forgotten as everyone moves on through their lives. Not just Jake and Mikey, or my brother Jordy, but everyone who has gotten to know my brother Joey through my blogs. That his legacy will never continue. Joey was 24 when he died, he had no children to carry on where he left off. I fear time will pass and with each year goes by that Joey is no longer with us his life will be forgotten.
I work hard to see that he is not ever forgotten. My brother Jordy has two girls, Olivia and Jaci, who were born after Joey died. They will never know him on earth, even though I believe they will meet him one day in heaven. I keep Joey's memory alive through them, talking to them about him. They have pictures of him sitting on their nightstands and pray for him often. Though he is no longer here, the memory of him is. So is the pain of losing him. The same pain that we all will face as our loved ones pass.
Writing that blog out of respect for my friend Cory and his buddy Davy came very natural to me as I have felt it, seen it, and experienced it. Until you have experienced that loss, you will never know that pain. Once you lose someone you love, you will forever live with that pain.
My parting advice to these students pursuing careers in various fields of media was this: Never try to write beyond what you know. Never reach for a feeling you have never experienced. Never assume how much pain someone else has unless you are living with that pain inside of you. Anyone can write about pain and how it hurts, but only someone who is living with it can write it in such a manner that your readers will feel it as though they are living through it. Keep it real, write with passion, be true to yourself and honest about your feelings.
I feel blessed for being offered the opportunity to share my thoughts with these students and I am sure as they continue their journey through their college days they will find success. I hope they have taken away from me as much as I walked away with from the time we spent together. I thank them for their interest in my blogs and I look forward to reading theirs.
