What do Batman, Cinderella, Peter Quill, Princess Elsa, and Harry Potter have in common?
They’re all orphans.
And truth be told, there are so many stories that couldn’t have begun without first killing off a mother and a father.
I’m fascinated by how the hero has to suffer the anguish of loss, face a wicked world without a protector or a guide and come out the other end of grief with the fierce independence they need to face the adventure ahead.
Batman’s parents were murdered and so he spent the rest of his life fighting criminals.
Cinderella’s parents died and so she was at the mercy of a stepmother who treated her like a slave.
Peter Quill’s mother died and he was taken up into a spaceship.
Elsa’s parents were killed in a shipwreck and she didn’t know what to do with her powers until they exploded out of her.
Harry Potter’s parents were murdered by Voldemort and so it was his destiny to defeat He Who Must Not Be Named.
My parents also died.
They weren’t killed by angry rhinos like the main character in Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. They were killed by cancer.
But before they left, they each gave me gifts that have morphed over time into my superpowers.
Both of them, in their own way, made it clear to me that they wanted nothing more than for me to have a better life than what they had. I’m sure all parents want that for their kids, but mine were obsessed with the idea.
My mom expressed her desire for me and my sisters to “do better” by placing a huge value on education. She did not go to college and it was her life’s mission to make sure that all three of her daughters graduated college because having an education meant that you would have freedom and choices in life.
My dad owned a small business, a sharpening shop. After a rocky period working as a car dealer his dream was to be his own boss and control his own destiny through entrepreneurship.
I’ll never forget the first time he asked me to help him in the shop, which was located in the barn in our backyard. He offered me five dollars to dust off some equipment after school. Since then, if I ever needed to earn money throughout high school (like when I wanted to go on a cruise to the Caribbean with the band) all I had to do was help my dad sharpen some router bits, planer blades, knives and saws. Like Cinderella, I was always covered in soot, but at least I was getting paid for it and spending time with my old man who took tremendous pride in what he had created out of nothing.
Even though he was proud of being a business owner, you could tell that things were not going as well as he had hoped. There were times when we didn’t have enough money for this or that, and times when Dad didn’t want to participate in family events because he was still working.
A few years later, when I was in college, things fell apart quickly.
My mom had leukemia. One day she was “fine” and the next she was in the urgent care unit.
I thought I could save the day by dropping out of school, taking a sad and lonely bus ride back home and telling my dad that I would help him keep the business running while Mom was in the hospital. She took care of the sales, driving around to other businesses and picking up their tools and delivering them when they were done. I would do what she did and everything would be fine.
The only problem was that it wasn’t enough.
There was nothing that I could do to save the business, to save my dad from the depression that overtook him, or save my mom’s life.
It was like a meteor pummeled into my life and left me standing at the edge of the crater, charred and empty-handed. Maybe the meteor had been heading for my house for decades and I didn’t know it. But there was nothing that I could do to get back what we had lost.
In the years that followed, while I navigated the unforgiving wilderness without a mother, I often dwelled on how things could have been different. How our family could have travelled more, spent more time together, how my parents could have had a happier marriage, and how my sisters and I could have stepped into adulthood with more confidence and support.
You just can’t go back in time and fix things that have been broken before you knew any better, and the cracks just went too deep. But one thing I knew.
I agreed with Dad 100% that it’s better to work for yourself than to have a job. But if you have a business, you need to make sure that you have enough new customers and money coming in.
Your quality of life depends on it. The happiness and well-being of your family is affected by it. And once you start to bring in more customers, your powers to do good extend to your community and to people all around the world.
At the time of my mother’s death I felt powerless to change the situation. It would have been like parting the sea without a staff or the power of God behind me.
When I first learned about copywriting it was like someone handed me a glowing sword that hummed with an infinite mysterious power. I began my training. When my dad died five years after mom, I used the money from life insurance to invest even further in my training in copywriting and marketing. It became my lifelong mission to understand how to wield that power and use it to help other people.