Saturday, April 7, 2012

Premature loss of a dear friend


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.

Donnie has been a major inspiration in my own nursing pursuits – he was a constant encouragement and cheerleader to me. I will greatly miss my friend