As posted in the Denver Yourhub.com longmont editon

Life is all about the lessons we learn. The joy, the pain, the grief and every other emotion we all experience are who we are, and we are molded by those experiences into the people we are today.
My son Corey J. Furney died in May of 2001. He would be turning 18 on the 19th of December this year. As you can imagine it has been a rough road to travel. His mother and I have struggled in our own, yet similar ways to become these different people than we were going to be. As a parent you can see the path you want to travel and the destination you want to get to. You make all the plans and steer your life in pursuit of that goal. We made it 13 years down that path with all those lessons we stacked up, being parents. We thought we were doing a pretty good job. We didn't have a manual that shows you how to raise a child, you watch, listen and learn and correct yourself as you go trying to help that one special being to make it in this world. When he died you learn all these new things about burying a child and trying not to die from the huge hole in your chest where you heart use to be. It felt like it was ripped right out of my chest. I watched it flutter away as my best friend told me, my son was dead.
I went back to work for a couple months and then slipped into my own personal hell for a year and a half. I just sat there and thought about him, I grieved for him and tortured myself with all the things I had come up short on, in his life. Every moment I ever let him down or broke a promise. I guess I was lucky. I finally decided that was not all I wanted out of life. Corey would want me to go on and do other things.
I am still trapped by some of my past. I don't see very many people yet and those who knew me before still treat me as I use to be. But that person died when Corey did, and a new person is there wanting to learn more and experience more. And wanting to feel more about everything in my life. It is as if my senses have awakened. I never knew the depths of happiness and sadness, anger and joy, or the value of schooling and what it means to be a man. What its like to have the whole world laid out before me as a big puzzle to figure out.
The lessons I have learned are tough ones and there maybe tougher ones ahead, but I will confront those on my terms and learn those lessons to become the person I am suppose to be.