As I stood there in my neighbor’s driveway and watched the hurse slowly pull out of the development, I felt my heart sink, and the pain and disturbance I felt was unimaginable. It almost felt like it was a nightmare, and for a moment I caught a spark of hope that maybe I would wake up and things would be like they were before. The entire day remains vividly in my head as if it happened yesterday. It will always remain tattooed in my memory.

It was a really ugly day, which was unfortunate because it was the last day of summer vacation. It was rainy, and smelled like mud and worms and it was a perfect day to go shopping. I was in desperate need of some new jeans for school, so my friend Danielle and I headed to the mall to buy some on sale. When we got there, of course there were no parking spots, so we headed to a diner called Stella’s, and planned on going home and then back out to a different mall.

When I turned onto my street I saw a line of cars parked around my house. I still remember being very irritated, because there were always people at my house, and we never had any alone time. My mom’s entire family, and my dad’s parents were all inside visiting. I was overwhelmed and at this point I didn’t know whether I wanted to cry, or hit someone. I looked over at my father laying in his at-home hospital bed and decided to read him a letter that I had written him the night before. He had a lot of pain pills in him, so he was trying to get up while I was talking. To this day, I still have no clue whether or not he heard what I was saying. When I read it, I truly had no idea that I chose the perfect day and time to read it.

When I finished reading it, I went into the living room and found the song, “You’ll be in my Heart,” by Phil Colliins, because it comforted me to hear it and I needed to emote, and I knew It would make me cry. A few seconds after I posted the song to my Facebook wall, things began to get chaotic. I heard my mom scream my name, in a frantic tone, and it almost made me afraid to see what she needed, so I hesitated for a minute. When I walked in I had caught the end of her phone conversation that she had with a doctor, but all I heard was the word morphine. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the room was my dad’s bed surrounded by his parents, and my mother who at this point were all sobbing. When I finally found the strength to look at my dad, all of the screaming and sounds faded to nothing, and my mind instantly froze. I saw my mom holding paper towels over his chest to try to hide the blood that was trickling from his body so fast that the towels couldn’t hide, or stop the bleeding. Then I noticed his pale, cold face had gone blank. I then looked into his warm brown eyes, and felt comforted when I held his hand and felt his pulse. It relieved me enough so that for a brief moment I started to regain awareness of everything going on around me. It was then that I acknowledged that my little sister Maura was not home yet from her trip to the mall. Everyone was telling my dad he had to hold on for her.

When Maura got home, she sprinted into the room, and immediately grabbed his hand and cried. About a minute after she grabbed his hand, his faint pulse came to a stop. I looked over at Maura to see if she had realized he was no longer with us, and Maura fell to the ground, too upset to find the strength to get back up. I felt sick to my stomach, and had to leave the room. People started to arrive minutes later, and I decided that I wanted to leave when they took him away. I left and went to my neighbor’s house with a few of my neighborhood friends, and we sat in the garage and cried.

As the salty taste of tears running down my cheeks embraced my mouth, I began to wonder why God chose to give my father this cruel fate. There is no explanation that can make me understand why it happened, but it has forever changed my life. Because of losing someone so close to me, I have transformed into a new, stronger person. That day, the cancer won the battle; the cancer took away my hero, and inspiration. It physically won, but will never take away my inspiration, or change the person I have become thanks to my father.