Web content? Ph.D.?  Okay…so I didn’t really get to stand on a podium in a cap and gown and deliver the commencement speech…but I should have.  At least that’s the way it would be, if life were fair.  Which we all know it is not.  I needed a brand new web site. “Sandi, you need to fill in this outline with all of your content, and when you’re through, send it back to us and we will turn it into your web site.”  Poof!  Magic! Cool!

Yes, so they had warned me.  ”Writing web site content is a lot of work.”  However, 3 weeks of 14 hours a day on my laptop, writing and writing and revising and revising and spell-checking and spell-checking and I was about ready to forget the whole web site idea.  At the end, I was so un-green as to print out the entire document.  Okay, I printed it out more than once during the process.  I still like my words on paper sometimes.  They carry more weight and seem more tangible. Stop frowning. I don’t feel guilty…but I’m going outside to plant a tree right after this anyway, okay?  So I click on “print”…and my printer keeps printing and printing and…printing.  In the end, I have an 88 page tome in front of me.  What is this, I think?  This is not a web site.  This is not a business document.  This is my f-ing life.  My sweat and blood.  My avalanche of tears over Drew’s premature death…boiled down into 88 pages.  This is my grief and my love and my loss…my journey back from the dark side.  Of my heart.  My recovery.  My own 12-step program.  Without having any actual proven weekly program to follow.  This is my widowhood thesis.  WOW.

You know what?  I don’t need a Ph.D. from Harvard.  I don’t need the diploma to frame and hang on the wall in my office or studio or gallery.  My ego doesn’t require it.  I know I have put in more time and effort and hard work and blood and sweat and tears than anyone who has worked on a post-graduate degree ever has.  At even the most prestigious of universities.  So, thank you Drew, for helping me get the degree I always felt I somehow needed.  You know, to prove myself to the world.  In yet one more way.  Like so many others do. The greatest lesson of all is that I don’t need any more than I already have.  And that having loved with my whole heart…and lost it all…and not only survived, but thrived and grown, is the greatest advanced education of all.  I know that wherever you are, you are thrilled to see me throwing my graduation cap up toward the sky and shouting, “Give me my damned diploma and get me the hell out of here!”