“I’m sorry, your mother didn’t make it. We did everything we could but she lost too much blood, she died before we could get to the hospital.” Those words played over in my head every minute of every day.

My mother died in a plane crash. She was on a business trip to Australia for a movie shooting, no, she wasn’t an actress. She was a journalist, just a normal person interviewing the producers of a nature documentary.

She died on the plane ride back to the States.

Severe turbulence… They were making their descent when lightning struck one of the wings of the plane. They crashed into an interstate highway on the east coast about 15 miles away from the airport.

My father and I got a call at 1:33 in the morning on June 6th 2016, the day of my high school graduation. I was the valedictorian… My mom was so excited to see me make my speech, we rehearsed over and over for weeks.

I made my speech and held back tears the entire time.

“My fellow classmates, we have made it to our graduation day, after over a decade of learning and struggle, some of us are off to complete even more school work in college, or trade school, or even medical school. Some of us will leave this graduation hall and never complete another piece of homework or another essay for the rest of their lives, they will go on to bigger and better things outside the realm of schooling.

I hope all of us live long, accomplished, full lives. That won’t be the case for us all obviously… I’m not being depressing, I’m being realistic. We will all look back on our high school days at some point in our lives.

Some of us will treasure our time over the past 4 years, some of us will try to repress the slightest memory of it, some of us will find that we peaked in high school and nothing better came afterwards, some of us will move on to become world leaders or change the world for the better or worse. We don’t know yet what we will accomplish, but I hope everyone of us can say we change something in the world for the better. Don’t let our generation become the lost generation, the one that didn’t do anything and has been forgotten or the generation that was consumed by technology, creat