Columns

Social media can be an extremely valuable tool.
You can keep up with that old friend from high school that you haven’t seen in years on Facebook.
People can make lost connections with family members.
News updates fly furiously second-by-second on Twitter.
Photographs can be shared and even LIKED.
However, as new social media is thought up everyday, we lose the actual human interactions that make relationships special.
We also see that for every benefit of social media, there is a flaw that can’t be denied.

Recently some of my family and I went to Kings Island. It had been the better part of 15 years since I had been there. Two teenagers, two children and three adults. This should be fun.  
I was excited to take a day off and go be a kid myself.
An hour and half to get there after a breakfast stop and making sure everyone had taken a potty break. We were as ready as ever to ride the rides everyone had been talking about since we left.
While we waited to pay our way in, everyone was jittery with excitement about what rollercoaster to get on first.

For me, last week began and ended with funerals.
On Monday, I attended the funeral of Mary Zawalich, whom I’d never met, or maybe I have and I don’t remember.
About a month ago, she called me. She told me her name and said she was 92 and she was dying, but that it was OK, that it was a “happy death.”
She had called to say that she’s been a reader of my column and that I’ve been a “wonderful part” of her life. She called to thank me, to say that she admired me, that she has loved me.

In November 1978, a group of true believers were led to their deaths in the forests of Guyana which is located near Venezuela on the eastern side of Latin America.  Their deaths were orchestrated by a religious leader who urged his followers to commit the “’revolutionary act’ of suicide.”