FOX 4
"I can't stand up here and pretend I want to be doing this speech right now," the teen said in his graduation speech -- wearing boots still muddy from burying his father hours earlier.
A North Texas high school valedictorian surprised a crowd of students, their families and faculty as he delivered an emotional graduation speech just hours after his father's funeral.
Alem Hadzic finished at top of his class at Early College High School, completing his senior year while his father was battling cancer. At the graduation ceremony, Hadzic told the audience that he didn't disclose his father's diagnosis to anyone as he didn't want to be treated differently during his final semester.
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"My father died yesterday, May 15th, 2024 and I attended his funeral today, right before graduation," he then revealed, as someone can be heard in the video above saying, "Oh my god." He explained his boots were muddy and his arms were still shaky "because I had to carry him into his grave and bury him."
"I can’t stand up here and pretend I want to be doing this speech right now," he continued. "But I can’t throw something away he worked so hard for me to achieve. That's why I am going to go to college and I am going to spend every hour of every day working as hard as I can to achieve all my goals. Because that's what he wanted and I'm going to do it for him."
"I want all of you to look to your loved ones and say you will do the same," he said, before the entire audience gave him a standing ovation, some dabbing tears from their eyes.
Speaking with FOX 4's Good Day after his comments went viral, the teen said he began writing his speech the day before, after learning his dad died. He said he didn't realize the funeral would be the next day at the time, so after attending the memorial he knew he had to tweak what he initally wrote.
"I couldn't just talk about what I wrote because so much more had happened since then. And so, I got on stage, I started reading the script and when I got to the part about my dad, I couldn't just read off a script anymore," he explained. "I had to talk about my experience, and I had to talk from the heart."
The high school graduate added that he "didn't expect to see so many people crying."
"I didn't know any of them but they came up to me. They made me feel better. They wanted to take pictures with me. They told me how strong I was and it made me feel so much better," he added. "It made me feel so good on such a dark day. It was really what I needed."
Asbury Park Press
