A Letter to my Graduating Class

On May 16th, 2022 over 900 students graduated from Miami University’s Farmer School of Business, myself included. That number should have been closer to 1350.

I remember sitting in Millett Hall all excited and dressed up, ready to throw my hat in the air after all the speeches. I even got to sit next to some close companions of mine.

I remember thinking about how great the last four years had been, the memories I made while at Miami, some good and some bad, and the struggles I fought through to get to that day. I had a sense of accomplishment for achieving a degree, and I was proud to be surrounded by good friends who had also persevered through good and bad times.

My family came up from Cincinnati for the graduation ceremony, and we were going to go to a party that afternoon, which I was excited about.

And yet somehow, I had an eerie feeling that something was wrong.

Very wrong.

I thought that maybe it could just be that feeling you get when you are at the end of something and you move on to another beginning. I talked to a lot of my classmates about sad feelings of graduating, and I even saw many of them cry as they gave their parting goodbyes.

Everyone gets a little sad at graduation, right?

But no, this feeling was much bigger than that. Something was missing.

I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach walking away from the graduation ceremony. There was no other way to describe it except for a feeling of deep sadness, like an empty hole in my heart that even the excitement of graduation could not fill.

It dawned on me that maybe that “something” wasn’t something at all, but rather, someone. Or even someones.

This is when I was reminded of a statistic someone shared with me just a few days before when interviewing for a job:

 “Johnny, one third of your generation has been killed through abortion.”

That was the first time I had heard that statistic, and then I realized why I was feeling so sad.

Our graduating class was 900, but it should have been closer to 1350.

I was reminded of the movie classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, where the main character George Bailey is given the unique gift to see what the world would have been like if he had never been born. I was reminded by the quote from his guardian angel, Clarence:

“Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

The Lord had given me a special grace that day to feel just a little bit the sense of the awful hole of missing classmates I never got the chance to meet, of girls I never got the chance to date, of laughter that wasn’t had, of lives that never got the chance to live.

With this number in mind, I’d like to ask my fellow classmates of Miami University, and anyone else reading this article, to just take a moment on this coming September 10th – the National Day of Remembrance for Abortion Victims – and help me mourn the millions of lives that have been lost to abortion. They were lost from our generation.

If you’re near Cincinnati, please join us in-person on September 10th at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery from 9am to 11am to mourn the loss of these abortion victims.

Perhaps we could all take a break from political statements for one day and just show our compassion by mourning our own fellow human beings who never got the chance at life…like we did.

By:  Johnny Giroux