Forgiveness the Theme of High School's Leadership Day Presentation

Students at Alexander Hamilton Jr./Sr. High School in the Elmsford Union Free School District learned about the act of forgiveness during a special assembly scheduled for Leadership Day Feb. 17.

The event, which took place in the high school auditorium, included three speakers from Breaking the Cycle, an award-winning program that stresses honest communication and forgiveness as a way of resolving conflicts by incorporating the real-life experiences of people.

This is the second time the group has presented at the high school. The organization has traveled to schools across New York State and other parts of the United States in an effort to generate self-respect and respect for others, both keys to school safety. In 2008, it launched a chapter in the U.K.

The speakers included Ann Marie D’Aliso, who lost her 16-year-old son Pat to suicide in 2004, Randi Kelder, whose 24-year-old brother Ryan died in 2015 of drug addiction, and Hashim Garrett, a former gangster who now runs his own consulting company, Wisdom and Understanding.

“How did we not know that our son was hurting?” Ms. D’Aliso said, as she told the students about her son’s gradual demise.

By all accounts, Pat D’Aliso was a talented and smart young man who seemed to have it all. It was only after his death that the D’Aliso family discovered he was suffering from clinical depression.

“If you have something going on and you feel like the pressures are too great, tell someone,” she said. “It’s not your job to take care of it.”

Ms. D’Aliso said that all she wanted to do was to be a good mother. “I failed at the one thing I wanted to do and be,” she added.

After the suicide, Ms. D’Aliso, who serves on the board of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said she felt tremendous guilt and had a hard time forgiving herself for what she believed was partially her fault.

“I knew nothing about suicide. I worried about everything else, but that wasn’t in my thought process,” she said, referring to the warning signs that she should have picked up on, but didn’t.

In another heart-wrenching presentation, Randi Kelder spoke about the relationship she had with her older brother and how she got him into drugs, an activity that turned into a heroin addiction.

“That one bad decision we made led him to where he is now,” said Ms. Kelder, who, like Ms. D’Aliso, felt incredible guilt when her brother passed away.

“I needed to learn how to forgive myself, and that’s the whole idea of this assembly,” she told the captivated audience.

“If you’ve done something that you regret, forgive yourself and forgive one another,” she added.

Mr. Garrett was 15 when he was shot by a member of his own gang. Growing up in Brooklyn, Mr. Garrett said he wasn’t always in trouble. By sixth grade, however, problems at home led him to a gang and his eventual near-death experience.

“I went from being the lamb to the lion,” he said, referring to the life he once led as a gangster. Mr. Garrett, the father of two children, recalled the moments after getting shot in the back with a submachine gun.

“I felt a kind of peace and tranquility that I had never felt before,” he said. Luckily for him, he survived the devastating accident, which left him partially paralyzed. But his story is not about a boy who got shot, he noted. It’s about a boy who went through something and came out the other end because of forgiveness, he said.

“Hating him hurts me, forgiving him helps me,” Mr. Garrett said, referring to the shooter. “Forgiving myself is hard.”

Copies of the book, “Why Forgive?” by Johann Christoph Arnold, were also available at the talk. It includes a number of essays from people like the late New York City police detective Steven McDonald, Mr. Garrett, Ms. D’Aliso and others.

Mr. Arnold is an award-winning author who writes on marriage, parenting and end-of-life issues