Letter to the editor

Memorials should have been postponed to allow wider attendance

I first met Jocelyn Denham when I began working at the East Side Boys & Girls Club in the Fall of 2006. She was so full of life you couldn’t help but like her.

I met Brady Freeman that summer, when he joined our hardworking, but fun loving East Side Team. He had an incredible way of always being able to turn someone’s frown upside down.

They not only touched the lives of those they worked with, but the lives of the many children they mentored.Finding out about their passing through a campus-wide e-mail was rough.

However, finding out within that same hour that I had already missed most of the events planned in remembrance of them was even worse. I respect the campus administrators and organizations that planned these events. They should want to help the community come together in healing, however I feel they could have done a much better job.

By planning most of these events on the weekend of Denham and Freeman’s passing, they did not allow for the entire PLU community, yet alone the surrounding community to 1) find out about their passing and 2) come together to honor them.

From my understanding of the mourning process, it is not something you can bang out in a weekend. I feel it would have been more appropriate to hold these events throughout that following week. This would have allowed all whose lives they touched, which was not isolated to the PLU on-campus community, to participate.

What consideration was given to the children of the Boy & Girls Club who will dearly miss their incredible mentors, or their off campus friends and co-workers, who will have found about their passing after these events to remember them concluded?

Seriously, would it have been so horrible to wait 48 hours to allow everybody to participate?
Incredibly disappointed,

Riley Relfe, senior