“Just Glow”: Augusto Cespedes Brings Grief, Healing, and Love to Light at Brookdale

There wasn’t a sound in the room—only the quiet hum of raw emotion—as Augusto Cespedes stood before a small but deeply moved audience at Brookdale Community College. With tears in his eyes and conviction in his voice, the U.S. Navy veteran and nurse practitioner shared his story.

Cespedes, born and raised in Cypress, Texas, joined the Navy in 2003, serving as a Hospital Corpsman with the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines. He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2005 and to Iraq in 2006, where he experienced the devastating loss of several close friends in combat—PVT Heath D. Warner, HN(FMF) Matthew G. Conte, and LCPL Daniel T. Morris. Those names are never far from his heart. “They didn’t get to live the lives I now live for them,” he told the audience.

His new memoir, Just Glow, is an unfiltered reflection on trauma, healing, and self-love. It’s not polished or literary in a traditional sense—but that’s exactly what makes it powerful. “I hated reading, hated writing,” Cespedes said. “But I wrote 88,000 words in 15 months. I don’t know how—maybe guilt. But it had to come out.”

The event was part of Brookdale’s Global Read series, a culminating experience for the Global Citizenship Project’s two-year focus on wellness. Ashley Zampogna-Krug, chair of the project, invited Cespedes to speak, noting that Just Glow brings a necessary vulnerability to the campus-wide conversation on mental health.

“He courageously shares his struggles and weaknesses as he experiences basic training and deployment,” she said. “It’s a meaningful complement to our Global Read, Make Your Bed by Admiral William H. McRaven, but with something more—raw honesty and the deep need to love oneself.”

That theme—self-love—emerged as the heart of the talk.

“I loved my family, my kids, my wife. But I never, ever thought to love myself,” Cespedes confessed, recounting the moment his therapist asked him a question he’d never considered: Do you love yourself? That question changed everything.

Cespedes spoke of the darkness that followed his deployments—sleepless nights, marathon runs to escape the pain, working high-stress shifts in the ER, and ultimately confronting a haunting sense of emptiness even after achieving the American dream. It wasn’t until he began writing that the healing began. “Every word in the book,” he said, “is something I carried in my head for 17 years.”

In the audience, listeners—many with tears in their eyes—connected deeply with his journey. One faculty member, the daughter of a World War II veteran, shared how her father’s silent grief shaped her own life of service and empathy. Another spoke of the challenge of carrying grief in a culture that demands constant positivity.

“We’re supposed to be perpetually okay,” said one professor. “Grief doesn’t fit in our Instagram culture. But what you’re doing is countercultural—and courageous.”

Throughout his talk, Cespedes returned again and again to the memory of his fallen friends. Holding up the photo of LCPL Daniel T. Morris silhouetted against an Iraqi sunset—featured on the cover of Just Glow—he explained, “Morris took this picture himself. He always said, ‘Memories, memories.’ And now this memory of him walking into the sunset means more to me every day.”

Cespedes now lives in New Jersey, where he works as a nurse practitioner and adjunct professor at Brookdale. He honors the memory of his brothers-in-arms through his family, his work, and now, through storytelling.

“I’m not a hero,” he told the room. “I’m just a man who chose a path that caused me pain. But I’m here because I know what Heath, Conte, and Morris would want: that I live—and that I love myself.”

And that, he says, is the message of Just Glow: even in the darkest corners of grief, love can still shine.