Jusdeep Singh Sethi’s smiling face is now a permanent fixture at Los Alamitos High School.
A plaque with his senior prom picture welcomes students to the school’s new outdoor wellness garden: The Oasis.
Sethi, a 2010 graduate of LAHS, drowned during a family vacation in Big Bear Lake a few years after graduation. Recently Sethi’s parents, Mohinder and Gurjit Sethi, added almost $50,000 to the school district’s $130,000 to help create the wellness garden next to the existing Well Space.
The new garden has seating, trees and a water feature meant to have a calming effect on students.
In 2013, Sethi was a 20-year-old interdisciplinary studies major at Cal State Northridge when he told his mother he was getting a job. She thought he’d work at McDonald’s or a retail store, she said.
But her son had other plans. He got a job at an arboretum in Pasadena.
His mother admitted she didn’t know what an arboretum was, but she knew he, “really, really loved nature and really wanted to help people,” she said.
After his death, Mohinder Sethi visited her son’s work, she said, talking with his coworkers and touching every plant he touched.
During a ribbon cutting ceremony for The Oasis on Tuesday, Sept. 5, Mohinder Sethi told a story from that fateful trip to the mountains.
As stones and rocks jabbed his feet as he walked barefoot, she asked her son, she said, “Why don’t you put your shoes back on?” His reply, she said: “It’s good to connect with the Earth, don’t you think so?”
She ended her remarks about the new garden saying, “Today I think he’s well connected with the Earth.”
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