Spread the Word to End the Word

I had lunch today with my friend Kerstin. She is a public high school teacher and she had an incident with a student using the R-word that was so upsetting (too upsetting for me to even recount), she was spurred to go home and spend the next four days creating this video. As she said, "It was a net gain."

She found the making of the video cathartic - and brutal. Hard to go back and look at all those pictures. Hard to go back there and look at all the heartache, hard work and heroism. Hard to go back. Period.

Her oldest daughter has different memories. Happy ones. Times that were brutal to Kerstin, are remembered as happy family times to her oldest daughter. "That's because we had scheduled grieving," Kerstin said. "We'd force ourselves to go out there and do 'fun' things, get our oldest daughter off to bed, then sob our hearts out."

Now Kerstin can grieve at her leisure. Producing this video helped her to do so. It also helped her to heal, which good grieving always does.