{"id":21565,"date":"2017-07-28T16:19:24","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T16:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/?p=21565"},"modified":"2017-07-28T16:19:24","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T16:19:24","slug":"expressing-my-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/expressing-my-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"Expressing My Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"When I was 17 years old, my family and I had traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for the 4th<\/sup> of July celebration with my extended family.\u00a0 \u00a0We were getting situated in the hotel room and my dad told me call my brother back in Michigan, who was unable to come with us due to his work schedule.\u00a0 I remember calling and not receiving an answer, so I assume he was sleep because he worked an early shift.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I would never be able to reach him again, that night my brother, who was 22 years old, was murdered while hanging out with friends.\u00a0 The telephone rang at 5am the morning of the 4th<\/sup> of July, and my dad answered the phone, I could literally see his heart stop at the news.\u00a0 He really didn\u2019t have to say much, I interpreted his facial expression immediately.\u00a0 The next 15 minutes were pure agony and my dad felt hopeless, as all three of his daughters screamed and cried, unable to comfort the pain we all felt.\u00a0 But then it was silence\u2026\u2026. awkward silence.\u00a0 The 12-hour ride home was extremely uncomfortable.\u00a0 We went through this grief process together as a family but also isolated.\u00a0 We talked about the funeral arrangements, we wrote out his obituary, we even agreed on what he would wear, but we never talked about how the death of my brother impacted each of us.\u00a0 It was a hard conversation that my family chose to avoid.\u00a0 But as we grew older those unresolved issues and the unaddressed matter resulted in mental and emotional breakdowns in other areas of our life.<\/p>\n

\"\"Then my brother\u2019s girlfriend gave birth to my nephew 6 months later.\u00a0 This baby would never know his dad, but what was even more difficult was the fact that we rarely mentioned my brother\u2019s name, how will this child ever learn about what type of man his dad was.\u00a0 This weighed very heavy on me and in my attempt to talk to my nephew about his dad, as well as to honor my brother, I founded the Dean J. Samuel\u2019s Identify Your Dream (IDYD) Foundation, where we offer grief support to children who lost their parents to violence.\u00a0 In my research of other grief support programs, I came across SandCastles.\u00a0 I did my research on the program and I wished that my family would have taken advantage of a program where we could have expressed our grief in a safe place with others with similar losses.<\/p>\n

\"\"Unfortunately, we face difficult losses every day, tomorrow isn\u2019t promised to anyone, but isn\u2019t it amazing to know it\u2019s ok to cry, it\u2019s ok to grieve, and it\u2019s ok to join a community of individuals learning how to build a new sand castle on the same shore where the ocean\u2019s waves destroyed their first one.\u00a0 I\u2019m so happy to work with SandCastles for my impact project, and I\u2019m excited about the synergistic relationship between them and IDYD.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was 17 years old, my family and I had traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for the 4th of July celebration with my extended family.\u00a0 \u00a0We were getting situated in the hotel room and my dad told me call my brother back in Michigan, who was unable to come with us due to his work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":21580,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}