The Healing Journey

July 9, 2026

A class I teach in public speaking usually causes my college students a lot of anxiety — and sometimes outright fear. You see, according to some surveys, public speaking ranks right up there with dying as far as the things that terrify us the most.

I’ve seen students break down and cry when they had to address their classmates. That’s how much stress it causes. At the same time, they’re not afraid to talk about death. Let me explain.

The first speaking assignment of the semester — sort of an ice-breaker to introduce them to the practice — is a simple two-minute speech on the topic, “If you could take anyone to dinner, living or dead, who would it be and why?”

A number of them respond the way I’d expect young people to, by selecting the notoriously popular celebrities and sports figures the internet is chronically abuzz over, starting with Taylor Swift, the Kardashian clan, globally popular soccer players Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

However, most students choose someone closer to home for their dinner date, such as an estranged father, a sister or a brother. But if they could, many would take someone to dinner who has died — a mother, a father, a sibling, grandparents, or a close friend lost to an overdose or even violence.

I’m always amazed and saddened to see how much grief students carry around with them. Very often, it’s grief that has just been stuffed away and hidden and never adequately dealt with. Then, every so often, they take it out and cry, and this speech gives them that chance.

It’s usually grief they acquired at a young age, when they had no prior understanding of what it was to lose a loved one or how to deal with it. And it’s usually the first time they intimately encountered death.

Sometimes, sad to say, their grief is accompanied by guilt that has been unresolved and often unwarranted. On a quiet summer evening, a young woman’s younger brother asked her to hang out with him, but she refused despite his pleas, so he went out with his friends and was killed in a drunken driving car accident.

Another lost a beloved cousin in a random shooting and yet another lost a brother to a drug overdose.

And I have to wonder: Who would have thought a public speaking class could be an occasion for young people to express their hidden grief and console one another, enduring the most fundamental suffering in life, the loss of a loved one.
©J Pisani

***