Tragedy Is Not the Teacher

Todd E. Cox 1994

Troy Alan Cox

6/27/2026

I had an experience that I will always remember as a radio D.J. on air.  It was the time I lost my voice during a live broadcast.  I was not ill.  I could no longer control my vocal cords.  

People often say that tragedy is life's greatest teacher.  I understand why they say it. Looking back, however, I no longer believe it is true. Trauma is not the teacher. Trauma simply interrupts the life you thought you were living. The worse the trauma, the more devastating the interruption to ones life.   The lessons come much later, if they come at all.  The harder the lesson is the least likely it is that your life before will look anything like the life you have after the tragedy.

For me, everything changed on January 31, 1994.

At the time, I was a young radio personality in Kansas City. After spending nearly two years working the overnight shift on an AM oldies station, I had finally earned a daytime position. Like so many people in their twenties, I thought I knew exactly where my life was headed. I wanted to work in radio and television. I dreamed of becoming another Dick Clark. My career was moving forward, life felt exciting, and the future seemed wide open.

Then, just after midnight, the telephone rang.  It was my mother and she wasn't calling to chat. She was screaming.

"Todd is dead."

There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after. That phone call was mine.  Before I was a happy person pursuing my materialistic goals of money, success and whatever made me happy.  After, I was lost.

My younger brother had been killed in a horrific motorcycle accident in Merced, California. He was twenty years old. A gifted artist, a bodybuilder, and the person in our family we all believed would someday make it big in Hollywood creating special effects for the movies. Instead, in a matter of seconds, everything changed.

The details made it even harder to understand. Todd and his girlfriend were riding back to his Air Force base after dinner when a driver pulled onto the shoulder of a four-lane highway. Thinking the car had stopped, Todd did what almost any experienced motorcyclist would do. He moved left to pass safely. What he couldn't have known was that the driver had decided to make an illegal U-turn across the highway.

They never had a chance.  His girlfriend died instantly. Todd survived for several hours on the side of the road with catastrophic injuries before he finally passed away.  To our dismay the court later ruled that both parties shared responsibility because Todd had been speeding to avoid the car.  The driver, whose license had already been suspended, walked away with little consequence. My parents, who had already lost their son, were later sued by the husband of the woman who died with Todd. It felt as though the tragedy refused to end.

I wish I could tell you that something meaningful came out of those first days.  It didn't.  People often imagine that profound loss immediately makes us wiser or more spiritual. It didn't do that for me. It simply shattered the person I thought I was.  It even stole my career.  The thing I thought I was going to do the rest of my life.  When I tried to return to work at the radio station, I discovered something I never imagined could happen.

I couldn't speak.

'And now back to the studio with Troy"  Delilah said.  I clicked the microphone to live and, nothing. The music faded. I opened my mouth, and my voice simply stopped working. I cried on the air. Not quietly. Not professionally. I just broke.  That was the end of my career in radio.  My instrument that had taken me from college radio to the legendary W.H.B. Kansas Cities Oldies and got me the promotion to K.U.D.L right before my brother died was gone.  Silence and tears. 

I quit my job, moved back in with my parents for the first time since leaving for college, and entered a house that no longer felt alive. We were all grieving, but we didn't know how to grieve together. My parents would sit silently in front of the television like zombies, devastated beyond words. Upstairs, I would curl into a ball on the bathroom floor and cry so violently that my whole body shook. I knew they could hear me. None of us knew how to reach the others.  We could not talk, even to each other.

Looking back, I realize something I could never have understood then.  My brother's death was not my teacher.  The tragedy was not the lesson.

It was the one question, burned into my psyche that would take me the next thirty years to answer.

Next week I'll share what happened after I ran away from everything I knew, and why that journey eventually led me to  where I am now and why I created The Safety Compass.