In her commencement speech today, First Lady Michelle Obama referred to the Virginia Tech massacre, comparing the student’s grief from the horrific deaths of their classmates to the experience she had when her father died.
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Obama praised the students for moving foward with their lives in spite of the crisis saying said that she went through a “similar process in her own life,” referring the death of one of her best fiends in college to cancer, and her father to multiple-sclerosis.
“I graduated from college and law school and I was like what a lot of you will be, up to my ears it debt.” Obama said, explaining to the students that she got a job at “one of the biggest law firms in Chicago.”
“For a while I was doing everything I was supposed to do, I had a fancy office, a big fat pay check and a really impressive line on my resume.”
The First lady added that the death of two important people in her life caused her to second-guess the decisions she made for her life.
“For months I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I have this physical since of loss, this gaping emptiness in my life and I couldn’t figure out how to fill it,” she said.
Obama said that her grief caused her to meditate on “how hard my dad worked to provide for our family” working at the city water plant in spite of his illness. “Pretty much all my college tuition was covered from loans and grants,” she added, “My dad still paid a small portion of it himself.
“As I grieved I realized that the best way for me to honor my dad’s life was by how I live my own life,” she said, saying she chose to “fill the hole,” left by her father’s death.
“So I left that fancy law firm and I wound up ultimately running a non-profit organization that trained young people for careers in public service.” she said. “Yeah I took a pay cut that made my mother cringe and my new office wasn’t nearly as nice as the old one,” she said, adding that as she began to help others she was able to cope with her father’s death.
“Like so many of you, through service, I was able to find what I need and carve a path in my life that truly felt like my own,” she added.
Obama told the students that they had the “power to invent the future,” referring to the College’s slogan.
“That’s a lesson I first learned back when I a teenager,” she said. “And some of you may have grown up in neighborhoods where very few of you had the chance to go to college or were being teased for doing well in school was just a fact in life. Where well meaning, but misguided folks questioned wether a girl with my background could get in the kind of colleges that I dreamed of attending.”
“But I worked hard,” she said. “And I did my best to tune out those voices of doubt.” she said, reminding the graduates that she was accepted to Princeton.
