Good Grief

Death has been a crazy underlying theme of this week. It has been on my mind and I haven't taken the time to post on it, but with the passing of Steve Jobs, I feel like I have to now.

I ran the Camp Good Grief 5K on Sunday. It was held a Memorial Gardens, a beautiful cemetery here in Memphis.

Creepy, I know, but it was the perfect place.

Camp Good Grief is a bereavement camp for kids who have lost parents, siblings, or very close family members. It is an amazing organization.

It's one of those needs in life that people really don't consider. People don't like to think that there are kids out there that need bereavement counseling.

Kids aren't supposed to go through that.

As Danny Thomas noted, they shouldn't die in the dawn of life either.

While running this race, I realized that Memphis gets a lot of bad stuff our way, but we handle it like champions.

High obesity rates.

High crime rates.

High poverty.

And churches on every corner.

I'm not proud to be a citizen of a city with any of the above. You would think that the first three and the last shouldn't correlate, but, for whatever reason, they do.

There are things, though, that I and many others love about Memphis.

St. Jude

Memorial Gardens

Le Bonheur

The Med

UT Medical School

The Zoo

The Art Museums

We may have bad things here, but we do our best to change lives. We raise millions for St. Jude every year. Just mention the name and you have already rallied the room.

Even if we aren't good for much beyond medical care, we change lives all over the world by being a volunteer, raising or giving money, or being a direct experience of any of the medical facilities here in town.

Even if I'm just a mediocre runner with an average time and generally average and boring lifestyle, I still want to be a part of something greater.

Even if I'm a nobody to the rest of the world, here, it is so easy to get involved and be something else.

Something better.

Memphis isn't the rich family with all these standards to keep.

We are a pretty country city. And pretty dysfunctional at times.

Yet when things get hard, we aren't too good or too big to admit problems and do our best to change them.

I wouldn't want another family for the world.