Sometimes it’s not the quality of one’s literary efforts, but the intent of the efforts that makes a difference in people’s lives.  I learned this lesson the tough way early in my writing career.

During my college days in the middle of Iowa’s cornfields, my roommate and I lived next to a very interesting classmate.  As resident assistants, it was our job to try to know everyone on our floor of the men’s dormitory.  This classmate kept to himself, but we found him to be a genuinely nice guy.  He was an absolute mathematical and science whizz.  He had been an avid bicyclist, even racing through the mountains of Europe, long before the U.S. enjoyed teams competing for winning the Tour de France and other races.  Unfortunately, his bicycling ended when he crashed streaking downhill on gravely mountain curves.  He skidded fifty+ yards on his face and head.  Some hundred stitches were required to put his head back together again.  Worse, the brain trauma left him with epileptic seizures.

Grand mal seizures sometimes occurred while he was in class.  This made other students very uncomfortable, if not horrified.  As a consequence, his social life was severely diminished.  He was in a race to obtain an education before the seizures made that impossible.  One day while he was walking across campus to class, he went down on the sidewalk with his worst seizure yet.  He died on the spot.  We had no idea he had died until we returned from our own classes.

The Dean of Men, who also lived in our dormitory, was not one who could handle a crisis or problems.  Days later, when our classmate’s parents from the East Coast showed up, he could not face them.  So he directed me to meet them and take them up into the attic to claim the items their son had stored there in a trunk.  It was heart-wrenching to watch his mother tenderly touch or unfold each article as memories and grief flowed over her.  Her departing words were how she was afraid her son had died alone and had no friends.

Her words struck my roommate and me to the core.  We had to do something to show her that there were people who cared for her son.  We did not know what to do, but finally came up with a poem (actually verse that was nearly doggerel and a bit embarrassing) that expressed how we felt about her talented, kind son, and we put it in the mail.

A month later an official-looking letter came to us from the Surgeon General of the United States.  Our classmate was his nephew.  He thanked us, saying that the letter had done wonders for helping the parents through their grief.  In fact, the verse became the centerpiece of the memorial service for their son, and our writing would always be cherished by the family.  It is not something I would want to put into a poetry collection, but it probably touched more people than any published poem could.  One never knows.