Every time I was hurt when I was younger, I was always comforted. I was held in the arms of a loved one and told that everything would be better. For the longest time it was true.

I looked to those who were older and wiser to find the answers to the questions that puzzled me. When I was hurt I looked to those who cared. I looked to the more experienced writers to help me flesh out my writing and I looked to those who were better than I am in radio to make me where I am today.

But who do you talk to about death?

How do you console the inconsolable? You don’t! You can’t because you rarely have the concept of the pain or immeasurable suffering that they are going through.

When I was younger, I remember my mom holding me and saying “everything is going to be alright”. I remember my dad telling me to “buck up and take it like a man.” I believed both of them.

Today I am battle weary from not just the lost of one younger sibling but two. All I can say back to them now is “are you sure?”

How can everything be ok? I’ve had friends tell me that my sibling’s purpose in life was complete; they had finished what they had to do on this earth.

I cannot accept this reasoning.

I have more people to touch, more to hold, more to comfort and more to love. But I have to do this on my own.

Many people I talk to these last couple of weeks tell me to be strong, happy and to smile. Most of the time I am strong, happy and I smile. But I have learned so many times in my life that you can not have joy without pain and happiness without suffering and sadness.

There are many lessons in life you have to learn. Some seem impossible, like the first time you tried to ride a bike. Some seem to be simple, but drive you crazy, like the first time you kissed someone you truly cared for. You both fumble around trying to find that middle, comfortable ground.

Some lessons in life you learn by mentoring. The first teacher that inspired you to achieve a dream that you would have thought to be impossible is one of your heroes. There is nothing better to a teacher than to see a child that they are mentoring eyes grow big in realization of “I GOT IT, I UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE TRYING TO TEACH ME!”.

There are lessons in life that we will never learn. No matter how many times we will for things to be different in life, they always end up the same. We can try to take different paths if they are offered to us but the path we needed to take to achieve our dream has long passed us by.

I will never be an astronaut. I can hope and pray, but I know that it will never happen. I can pray that the end of my marriage was all just a dream but that is not reality. Reality bites and as much as we don’t want to admit it, we have to live with the mistakes we have made in life and the lessons that we have learned and not learned.

As much as we are now guided with self-help books and gurus who claim to have the solutions to all of our problems, it is up to us to make the decisions that change our life. It is up to us to make the head scratching judgments that cause our friends and family to cry “What are they thinking?” as they support us anyway.

And as much as we try to rationalize the mistakes we have made and try to make logical the illogical moves that we have made there is only one thing that I can tell.

We can try to be led by loved ones, friends, family, pastors, and others but…

Sometimes the best lessons in life are the ones we learn on our own.
Sometimes we have to have that DOH feeling come over us and that feeling that “My God, what did I DO?”

But as hard as we listen to others sometimes we have blinders on. We ignore their sage advice because we “know better”

We make mistakes because we are human.

And the best lessons learned are the ones learned alone.