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| Donny Jacobs: 11/28/85-4/3/12 |
Today I had to speak at my dear friend's funeral. Since we were inseparable when we were young, the family asked me to speak about his early years. Death becomes a common occurrence to you when you are in the healthcare field, but his death knocked me upside the head like a ton of bricks. When you are 25 you don't expect someone you have been close to since the cradle to fall asleep and not wake up. Donny was a great guy. He was going to be graduating from Vanderbuilt as a nurse practitioner with a specialty in critical care. He wanted to be the best nurse there was, and he was on that path of becoming just that. Even though we had gotten older and started on our own pathways of life, he was someone that I always felt close to even if we hadn't talked or seen each other in a while. Donny showed me that it was okay to set your sights high and then go for them and achieve them. He was an incredibly successful nurse and an inspiration to me for going back to nursing school and achieving my goals.
Below is what I read at his funeral.
Hi – My name Sarah Parker, & I grew up with Donny.
Today is a happy- sad day for us. Sad because a very dear
friend has left this earth. But it is also a happy day because we are
celebrating the life of Donny, our dear friend. When I think about it- for me,
Donny has always been there. Let me explain … the fact is that I honestly
cannot remember life before we were friends. Both our parents work at Bob Jones
University and we were neighbors in faculty court on campus. Donny and I ended
up being play buddies and doing everything together as youngsters, whether we
were supposed to or not!
As I started thinking back on all those good times, I couldn’t
help but laugh at many of the things we did - and things we got in trouble for
doing.
One day Donny, Allen & I were playing tag & I was
“it.” The boys started to climb the trees to get away from me, so I went up
after them. Higher and higher we went. These trees just happened to be directly
up against the back of the Dinning Common, and it turned out if you went high enough
you could get up onto the roof … and that’s just what we did! We thought we
were pretty cool running around up there and we almost got away with it, but the
next thing we knew one of us was stuck and someone had to go get a ladder to save
us.
Donny’s love for science started when he was young. I can remember
going over to his house & he’d show me all the cacti he was growing or his
new snake that he had to feed. He even had those hermit crabs & we would sit
and stare at those things forever in the hopes that one would come out of its
shell and move into the next/bigger size shell. He promised me that they
actually did do it, but I surely never saw it happen!
His family had moved to over Blythwood Street and we moved to
White Oak- just one street apart. We walked home from school together almost
every day. We would stop, inspect bugs, and talk about any and everything. One
day we stopped to look at someone’s new puppy. Time slipped by and we knew that
we better hurry home. We gathered our things- well most of them. The next day
on the way home Donny spotted my viola case in the ditch. It had been left in
there overnight!
I used to get so mad at Donny in elementary school. He started
going to LRC a couple of times a week during recess to work on homework. Recess
was supposed to be our time during the school day to have fun. It’s when we pretended
we were orphans stuck in an orphanage, trying to escape from the evil teachers.
Whether it was his choice, or not, back then he learned early that his studies
were important and he worked hard to better himself.
One year we were fascinated by ladybugs and we started catching
as many as we could at recess. It was our personal science project. When we
walked home from school together we would catch even more of them. Our poor
mothers got stuck with all the forgotten ladybugs, squashed in our backpack
pockets … and the smell was not nice! We tried so hard to be legitimate
scientists. We tallied the number of spots each bug had and gave them names.
Donny learned what they liked to eat and we made them a home. It was really
just a huge pickle jar from school with holes poked in the lid for air, but it
was our little creation. My mom was a K4 teacher and she figured out a way for
Donny and I to come over to her class and teach them about a ladybug’s life.
Ok, maybe it helped that his dad was the principle! We must have been in either
3rd or 4th grade at the time. I will never forget how
excited we were walking across the playground, over to the other elementary
building, holding our big pickle jar full of ladybugs. Donny was a leader and a
teacher at heart from the beginning.
It is neat to see the different qualities that made Donny
special as a young boy, represented in the grown up version of the Donny we all
knew and loved. What you saw in Donny is what you got. He was one of those
loyal friends that you could always count on. He had a heart a mile wide, and a
smile to go with it.
