CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Blog by Race Chaser Online Managing Editor Jacob Seelman — Nick Laham/Getty Images North America photo —

It’s not often I get emotional sitting down to write, but this is one of those times.

Truth be told, had I not looked at my calendar (and I mean really looked at it) I would have forgotten what today was.

And then it hit me.

Today marks three years to the day since we lost Dan Wheldon in a terrifying Verizon IndyCar Series crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway during the IndyCar World Championships. It’s a moment that paralyzed the racing world and a moment those of us who were fans of the series and followed it regularly will never forget.

I remember exactly where I was when I got the word something was terribly wrong. I actually wasn’t home for the start of the race — I was on the way back from a marching band competition with my high school when a friend of mine called from Indiana.

“As soon as you get home, turn on your TV,” he said to me. “The IndyCar race went bad. It’s really really bad.”

At that moment, my mind was racing. I didn’t even know what had happened at that point, hadn’t seen any video, nothing. I was totally in the dark save for those three sentences. But I was worried.

“Bad” in motorsports usually only means one of two things: fans are hurt, or we’ve lost a driver. I didn’t want either of those things to be true of course, but knowing where the series was at, and the potential of the race cars, I knew either or both had a good possibility of being a reality.

By the time I got home and saw the video of the crash, it started to sink in. The gravity of the situation hit me, and I went numb. When they said it was Dan that was the most seriously injured, I couldn’t believe it. Dan was one of the truly nice guys, as people in my family would say, “he was one of the good guys, the hero against the villain”. There was no way this was happening.

Was there?

And then at 6 p.m. Eastern time, the news broke. He was gone. The brilliant smile was forever lost, and one of open-wheel racing’s brightest stars was blotted out in a terrible, fiery tragedy.

I cried. I curled into my dad’s lap and cried for almost an hour. I have no shame in admitting that. Though I’m a media member, I’m also a fan, but more importantly, I’m human. The emotion of the situation overwhelmed me. And though I had never met him, I felt like I had lost a friend, because that’s just the kind of personality Dan was. He was real, he was genuine, and even if you weren’t looking him in the face eye-to-eye, you felt like you knew him. Having that kind of a person ripped away, the kind of person that can brighten the day of anyone who happens to see him on TV or in person, that hurt.

The day that followed was tough. I admit, I let it affect me more than I probably should have. But I didn’t know what else to do. I had just started working in the world of motorsports media about a month prior to the accident and I didn’t know how else to react. I didn’t want to do anything and the last thing I wanted to do was think about racing.

But something that was said by a driver, I can’t remember which one exactly, following Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001 struck me late that next night.

“They would have wanted us to race on, because if the shoe were on the other foot, they would have raced on for us.”

That was the moment when I realized that yes, it’s okay to hurt, because these are our friends, and our colleagues — but they would want us to keep the sport they loved alive because it’s part of their legacy and if they were still here, they would want to be enjoying it as well.

That was the first thing I learned following Dan’s death, and it was the moment I started to heal and realize that it might take time, but things are going to eventually be okay again.

I realized in the weeks and months that followed that there were more things I had learned from Dan that I never really thought about until he wasn’t there and it made you start thinking about what was different when he was there.

When he won the Indy 500 that May and you saw the pure jubilation and joy in his eyes of being there and standing triumphant in the race he loved so much, with his wife and his little boys, I realized he had taught me the value of living in the moment — that you have to enjoy each moment and take all the joy you can out of that second because we don’t know when our time on this earth is going to come to an end. He did that at Indy and taught me that I needed to do so in everything I did.

When he was in the broadcast booth for a couple of races just prior to inking a two-race deal with Sam Schmidt to race the No. 77 car at the end of the season, he taught me that even when the chips are down and things aren’t where you want them to be, you have to be optimistic and keep the faith that things are going to get better, because it’s all part of a grander plan that as Dan once said “the guy upstairs is steering, we’re just down here pushing the pedals”. He was so upbeat about the prospect of getting back in the car and said that even though he didn’t have a deal in place then, he wasn’t going to give up because to give up would be to abandon his dream and his passion.

Above all though, Dan taught me that family comes first. That was what was so important to him during that Indianapolis win in May of 2011 — that his wife Susie and his sons Sebastian and Oliver were there with him. Dan was a family man, as Robin Miller described him in the days following the Brit’s death, and he made that evident in everything he did that year. It was rare you saw pictures of him without his family, and I heard many people say after he passed that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for them because that’s just who Dan Wheldon was. He was selfless, he was kind, and he was a champion in every sense of the word.

I think in a way, each of us can find something that we can or have learned from Dan over the time that we watched him or knew him, because he was one of those people that made a lasting impression and you couldn’t not appreciate what he did for everyone he came into contact with along the way.

Speaking of impressions, his nickname, “Lionheart”, is one that has stuck with me ever since the crash — I have the decal on my car and I see it every time I get in or get out when I’ve gone down the road. It’s also a quality I’ve tried to embrace. I was never the one to just on a whim stand up and speak when I was in school, and I wasn’t one for a while to really make an effort at paving my own way. But after Dan died and I started thinking about his legacy, all of that changed.

Dan was never one to follow the crowd, he was strong, he was loyal, and he did it his way — from his 2005 IndyCar championship to his second Indy 500 victory with Bryan Herta — and even to that final race, where he started 34th for a shot at five million dollars, all because it was going to be part of the pageantry of what was supposed to be IndyCar’s most memorable weekend.

It was that, but unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.

But, as I sit here to conclude this blog, I think that Dan would never have wanted us to look at it that way. He would have wanted us to put a smile on our faces, remember the good times we had with him and carry the sport on in his honor — because if it had been someone else, he would have done the same thing for them.

So on this day, I look back on that Las Vegas race, and yes — it still hurts that Dan isn’t here — but I’m not truly sad anymore. Instead, I’m smiling thinking about all the fun that Dan is surely having right now watching how we’ve advanced the sport with a car named after him (the DW12) and seen his competitors and friends carry on and succeed in the race and the series he loved so much.

So friends, don’t despair in the fact that Dan isn’t with us. Smile, like he would have wanted us to, and think about what we learned from him while he was here making the world a brighter place.

And maybe click on that replay of the 2011 Indianapolis 500 and take in his smile one more time.

We miss you Dan.

Godspeed Lionheart.