If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was 'over it'. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breathe and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before.

Either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday or you start dying.

Concentrate on the things that matter to you.

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.

What happened after Katrina is that people were stirred to action; there were an enormous number of contributions by people trying to make a difference. But then we forget. We've forgotten Katrina victims, we've forgotten the face of poverty.

Almost everybody embraces life.

I grew up in a Navy family.