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Writings Inspired by ... |
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Micah’s Essay |
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In the living room, flooded with darkness, my dad stared at the floor pensively, unsure how to begin. He grappled with his tangled thoughts, trying to convert them into a sentence. After he finally told me that my sister had cancer, I stared at the ground, expressionless in the silence. In this instant of frozen time, my childhood escaped through my desperate grasp. At this moment I entered adulthood: a fourth grader at Myers Elementary with socks pulled up high to knees scraped on baseball diamonds and soccer fields. I watched my parents crumble under the weight. They abandoned their normal lives and struggled to adjust to a world of disorder: arcane medical procedures, and terms, sleepless nights, and living in small hospital bedrooms. The childish doctrine that heroic parents have an unlimited supply of power and knowledge collapsed when I watched the fear and uncertainty conquer their faces. My carefree world that did not exist beyond second-period recess; my “heroic” parents and sports crashed to the ground. In place of the old empire of fantasy, I gained a realistic interpretation of the world; for the first time, I actually witnessed suffering and disorder, realities which I remotely knew before as mere words in the back of my mind. I rarely saw both my parents at the same time and hardly ever saw my sister. My past life of normalcy disappeared in the darkness of the crisis. I became sickeningly familiar with take-out dinners, doctors, medicines, random trips to the hospital, and sleeping out. For the first time, I felt the sting of independence and chaos. Abandoning the idea that I had enough power to cure my sister, I forced myself to adjust to this new environment of disorder. With this realization, I took my first step as an adult. From underneath the wreckage of my sister’s illness, I found the meaning of adulthood. Becoming an adult means to accept the fact that unsolvable problems exist in the world and to adjust to them without complaining. Thrown out of childhood into a new world of problems and disorder, I needed to make sacrifices and adjustments in order to spare my parents the extra burden of a whining child and to keep my head above the waves of chaos. Before I could adjust to this new environment, I needed to accept my powerlessness to chance fate. Afterwards, I trudged ahead in the darkness with a flashlight of hope and offered every ounce of my cooperation on the way, fueled by my new sense of duty. When my sister’s remission finally came, I didn’t accept it as a happy ending or the finality of a terrible flight from a normalcy, but as a happy change which might not last forever. With the crashing empire of my childhood fantasy fell the concept of normalcy and consistency in life, which can spontaneously change at any moment. Micah DeLaurentis will graduate from Wesleyan University in May, 2005.
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