A Texas high school valedictorian delivered a powerful and emotional speech dedicated to his father just hours after attending his funeral.
Still wearing the muddy shoes he wore to bury his father, Miralem, 18-year-old Alem Hadzic stood at the podium to give a speech to the graduating class of Early College High School on May 16. Revealed the tragedy.
“I want to say one more thing: I want to see if I can overcome this situation,” Hadzic said before delivering the heartbreaking news. “Yesterday, on May 15, 2024, his father passed away. Today, just before graduation, I attended his father’s funeral.”
“So my shoes are muddy and my arms are shaking because I had to carry him to the grave and bury him,” he said in the video. I posted it on Facebook.
Hadzic’s revelation, which came after encouraging his classmates, shocked the entire audience, filling the hall with cries and sympathy.
Miralem Hadzic was diagnosed with cancer just five months before the ceremony, and her son only announced the news to a few close friends.
“Hadzic decided to keep this a secret from his colleagues because he didn’t want anyone to treat him any differently because of it,” the Carrollton Farmers Branch Independent reported. The school district announced.
Early College High School is located 24 miles north of Dallas.
The graduating student, who plans to study chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin this fall, said he owed it to his father to make the speech that got him to the top of his class.
“I can’t stand here and pretend I want to give this speech right now. But I can’t throw away what he worked so hard for me,” Hadzic said. “That’s why I’m going to college and working hard every day to achieve all my goals.
“Because that’s what he wanted and I’m going to do it for him,” he added.
In his powerful and uplifting speech, Hadzic was surprised to see how many people were touched by his father’s death.
“I stood there. I said my speech. I looked into the audience and I had no idea there were so many people crying.” Hadzic told Fox 4.
After the ceremony, Hadzic met many people, most of them strangers, who offered their support during his extremely emotional day.
“I didn’t know any of them, but they came up to me. They made me feel good. They wanted to take a picture with me. They told me how strong I was and it made me feel so much better on such a dark day. That was really what I needed. I did.
Hadzic said he made last-minute changes to his prepared remarks because his life had changed dramatically since he first wrote them.
“It was scary because I really didn’t know. I went to my father’s funeral last minute,” Hadzic told the magazine. “So much has happened since then that I couldn’t just talk about what I had written. And then I got on stage. When I started reading the script and got to the part about my father, I was already done. I couldn’t just read the script. I had to speak about my experience and from the heart.”
Relatives of Miralem’s colleagues A GoFundMe page has been created After receiving his diagnosis.
