Scholarship award

Last night we presented Emma's memorial scholarship at her high school and a very dear friend (who drove 2 hours to be with us!) presented the scholarship at the high school across town. Here's what we said:


As you all know, our precious daughter Emma passed away a year ago. When we originally established this scholarship fund last June in her memory, we envisioned it as a way to celebrate her life. Emma was a gifted and passionate musician, planning a future in music, either as a performer or educator. Through the scholarship fund, we felt that we could provide other young musicians with the educational opportunities we had hoped to provide Emma. We hoped this would be a lasting and fitting legacy for our daughter and a way to remember not just her passion for music, but also her kind and compassionate nature and her unique ability to deeply touch people’s lives.


In short, we expected that each year, on this special evening, we would remember Emma for how she lived, not how she died.


In the intervening months, however, things changed. Over the past year, we have become increasingly aware of the importance of talking about how Emma died. You see, Emma died by suicide, and people just don’t talk about that. And because people don’t talk about it, suicide has gone virtually un-addressed by our nation. It’s one of the few remaining subjects of importance that no one wants to discuss openly and candidly. So we hope you will forgive us if we take a moment to do just that – talk about it.


After Emma’s death we learned some shocking statistics about suicide. We learned that in the US, suicide claims nearly as many lives each year as breast cancer and more than twice as many as HIV/AIDS. We learned that it is the third leading cause of death for people ages 15-24, the second leading cause of death for college students, and that it claims the lives of high school students at a rate of more than ten per day. We learned that depression, anxiety and other treatable mental illnesses that are root causes of suicide are extremely common in adolescence and young adulthood, but that many – far too many – who are suffering fail to ask for help because they are afraid, ashamed, or are just unaware that they CAN be helped.


Most of us don’t hear these fact and figures about suicide and mental illness because there is a wall of silence around them – a wall that is constructed from our own fear, ignorance, shame, and blame. And this wall is preventing us from having the kind of community and national dialogue that would start us on the path to eradicating this senseless loss of life.


We’ve seen this before, and there are important lessons we can learn. We couldn’t make progress in the battle against breast cancer until we were willing to talk about it openly. And the wall of fear, ignorance, blame and shame that surrounded HIV/AIDS had to come down before we could gather the collective will to do something about that disease.


Now we think it’s time to take a sledgehammer to the wall of silence that surrounds suicide and mental illness. Dialog will promote action, and action, in the form of education, awareness, treatment and research, will save lives.


That is a lesson we learned from many of you seniors. We watched as you turned your grief to action after Emma’s death. You got the facts, you raised money and you raised awareness. You weren’t afraid to speak up, and you weren’t afraid to act. You started chipping away at the silence and honored Emma in the best way possible, by doing what you can to be sure that this never happens again. For that we are forever grateful and hopeful that you will carry that spirit and determination to your colleges and beyond.


And now for the award…