He went into Dr. Ferris Odom’s office on a Tuesday and asked whether the school still had his sister’s diploma.
They did.
I did not know that. I want to be extremely clear: I did not know that a diploma with my daughter’s name on it had been sitting in a records room at that school for ten years.
They’d prepared it in May of 2016 with everybody else’s. When she died, the district’s policy was that it could be conferred posthumously if the family requested it at the ceremony, and if not, it would be held for the family to collect.
Somebody called me in June of 2016 about collecting it.
I remember the phone call and I remember absolutely nothing about what I said, and I never went.
I could not walk into that building. I did not walk into that building again until the twenty-second of May, 2026, ten years and five days later, to watch my son.
