A Texas high school valedictorian gave a powerful, emotional speech dedicated to his father just hours after attending his funeral.
Alem Hadzic, 18, still wearing the muddy shoes he wore to bury his father, Miralem, revealed the tragedy when he stood at the podium for his speech to his fellow graduates of Early College High School on May 16.
“I have one more thing to say, I want to see if I can get through this,” Hadzic said before delivering the gut-wrenching news. “My father died yesterday, May 15, 2024, and I attended his funeral today right before graduation.”
“That’s why my shoes are muddy, that’s why my arms are shaking because I had to carry him into his grave and bury him,” he said in a video posted to Facebook.
Hadzic’s revelation, which came after encouraging his classmates, shocked the entire audience as cries and empathy filled the room.
Miralem Hadzic was diagnosed with cancer only five months before the ceremony and his son only shared the news of his death to a few of his closest friends.
“Hadzic chose to keep this a secret from his peers, not wanting anyone to treat him differently because of it,” the Carrolton Farmers Branch Independent School District said.
Early College High School is located 15 miles north of Dallas.
The graduate, who will be attending the University of Texas at Austin to study chemical engineering in the fall, says he went ahead with the speech because his father was the reason he ended up top of his class.
“I can’t stand up here and pretend I want to be doing this speech right now. But I can’t throw something away he worked so hard for me to achieve,” Hadzic said. “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,” he added.
During his powerful, uplifting speech, Hadzic was surprised to see how many people moved by his father’s death.
“I got up there. I said my speech. I looked in the audience and I didn’t expect to see so many people crying,” Hadzic told Fox 4.
Following the ceremony, Hadzic was met by many people — mostly strangers who gave him support on his extremely emotional day.
“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. It made me feel so good on such a dark day. It was really what I needed,” he said.
Hadzic says he made a last-minute change to his prepared remarks because his life dramatically changed since he initially wrote it.
“I was scared because I really didn’t know. I went to my dad’s funeral right before,” Hadzic told the outlet. “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. I had to talk about my experience, and I had to talk from the heart.”
A relative of one of Miralem’s co-workers created a GoFundMe page following his diagnosis.