A Princess’ Lesson in Love

The author is a 2008 LIFE Lessons Scholarship recipient. Each year, the LIFE Foundation awards scholarships to college students impacted by the death of a parent. While the scholarship is helping the Western Carolina University sophomore fulfill her dream of attending college, her story underscores the need for parents to include life insurance in their college-funding plans. Click here to view her scholarship contest video entry.

Life is all about lessons. I learned this as a young child, and it is something that is still true now that I am a college student. Being an adult doesn’t change the fact that there are lessons to learn. It just means that the lessons get tougher.

I very distinctly remember a lesson my daddy taught me on the sidewalk as I was getting ready to practice rollerblading. I don’t remember exactly what I was talking about, but I’m sure it was one of my ever-popular childhood speeches about how I was going to become a princess someday. Of course, my daddy never told me that I couldn’t become a princess. In fact, he made sure I knew that, in his eyes, I already was a princess. But when I insisted that in order to be a real princess I needed a pony or a crown is when my daddy insisted that, due to financial limitations, I would have to make do with plastic dress-up crowns and My Pretty Pony dolls. This was the moment when I learned a very important lesson. “Everything in life costs money, Morgan,” my dad told me, “even rollerblading.” I, of course, being about 6 or 7 years old, insisted that there had to be something in life that did not cost money. “What about being born, daddy? Of course being born doesn’t cost money!”I argued. I was very good at arguing. My dad patiently corrected me, saying “Even being born costs money. Somebody has to pay the doctor and the hospital, buy the clothes that the baby will wear, and buy a car seat to take the baby home in.” Of course, being a childhood professional in the lost art of argument, the conversation continued for a good half hour before I was fully convinced that everything in life does costs money.

Even though I accepted and internalized this lesson, it was not until I was 11 years old that I fully realized the impact of what my daddy had taught me. One evening in October, just after I had started the sixth grade, I was waiting for my daddy to come home from work so he could take me up to bed. The doorbell rang and I opened up our home to the worst kind of disaster it would ever encounter. A police officer, in full uniform, asked to talk to my mother, and I knew right then that my daddy was gone forever.

The death of a parent is devastating to anyone, but it seemed especially difficult for me. I was the epitome of a “daddy’s girl”. I adored my daddy as if he were the sun the Earth revolved around, and losing him made it seem like the planet was falling off its axis. I remember sitting alone on the steps the next morning, while what seemed like hundreds of strangers filled our house. I was thinking about my dance lessons. Even as an eleven-year-old, I ate, slept, breathed, and dreamed dance. I felt like a bad daughter to be thinking this, but I was extremely concerned about how my family would afford for me to keep dancing now that my daddy was gone. I couldn’t have put it into words at the time, but I knew that my dancing was the only thing that would hold me together during the months and years ahead.

For as long as I could remember, my family struggled with money, the struggle being that there never seemed to be enough of it. When I was a child, we lived in various apartments and even my grandparent’s spare bedroom before moving into a small ranch house in New York. My clothes were never from the brand name stores where my classmates shopped, unless I was lucky enough to come upon their hand-me-downs at a garage sale in the richer neighborhoods. My mom decided to go to college when I was young, although we couldn’t afford for her to quit her job and go full time. So, my baby brother and I spent a lot of time at our grandparents ,or at our daddy’s work while my mom took night classes. We ate so many cans of spaghetti that to this day they have become a running joke in our family. My dad worked an average of three jobs at any given time in addition to being a dedicated volunteer firefighter. When I made the competition dance team, my dad took on extra odd jobs to pay for my lessons, including a janitorial position with the dance studio. Only six months before my daddy died, we moved into a new house which needed to be remodeled just to be livable. Putting all of these pieces together, it is easy to see how I became so convinced that my dance career was over.

While I was concerned with my dance dreams, my mom was facing ten thousand dollars in funeral, burial, and headstone costs, a house that still needed repairs, and the expense of raising and feeding two young children. My initial concerns about dance paled in comparison to the massive financial strain we were about to encounter.

Luckily, my parents understood the need to plan for the worst. Even though they were only in their 30s, they scrimped and saved in order to make sure they had life insurance. They hoped they would never need it, but they knew that they needed to prepare for the unimaginable. Because of their planning, we were able to have an honorable fireman’s funeral for my daddy. We weren’t forced to move out of our house, and I was able to keep dancing. Grief is not a time to make important financial decisions, such as selling a house, and having life insurance kept us from having to do that. Eventually, I was able to go to college. Life insurance didn’t necessarily pay for everything, but it did keep us afloat and out of debt so that we could better handle our needs. If it wasn’t for life insurance, I can only imagine the debt my family would be in and how different our lives would be. I certainly would not be in North Carolina attending college. Life, and death, is hard enough to handle without having to worry about where you will live, how you will pay your bills, or if your kids will be able to pursue their passions.

Even though I am only 19 years old, I know that as soon as I am out of college and have a job I will be signing my own life insurance policy. It’s not that I am planning on dying anytime soon; it is just that I would rather spend the money, and look back when I am 100 and be glad I never needed it, than to die when I am 30 and leave my family stranded. It’s just another one of those lessons that I learned from my daddy: Everything in life costs money. Always hope for the best, but be prepared for a change in plans.