Undergraduate /
"it turned to be cancer" - Common App Essay [11]
I would really appreciate any help/advice for shortening my essay!
Untitled:
In some boxes packed away in the basement sit my nine-year-old crayon drawings of my family, the slightly-better-than-stick lines of my mother and father and me clasping hands and smiling. Beside them lay poems and sketches of my loving family, and especially Baba...To me, he was perfect. Growing up, he was the perfect image I felt every father should be, and I believed I lived in a perfect world, with an ideal Mama and Baba, with an ideal family, with an ideal life. I viewed the world selfishly, seeing the world only the way I wanted to see it, and clutched onto that perfect world most desperately. Yet like all things, it crumbled away. In one cold October, Baba felt a lump behind his right ear. The doctors biopsied, and sure enough, it turned to be cancer.
Time passed and my father started chemo. Baba got thinner and thinner, strange machines and IV drips suddenly appeared in our house, and he could no longer walk without help. My family, although wanting to do its best to help, began falling apart as tensions rose between my grandmothers, my mom, and my dad. Arguments were frequent, but the silence was constant.
Though I was perceptive enough to recognize that my family was in pain, I made the mistake of believe I understood their pain. I resolved to help out as best I could, refrained from sharing my own fears and worries, yet encouraged them to express their own. But even caring and loving acts, if done long enough, can turn into monotonous and annoying chores.
My father's suffering, my family's arguments, and even my own fears, soon lost their novelty. On the outside, I would still help out my dad by doing things around the house: washing dishes, occasionally cooking, finding him his supplies. I would try to ease the strain between my grandmothers and my parents. But inside, I felt nothing...or at least, I ignored what I felt. Unable to handle my fears of loss and the unknown, I turned to resentment. Though never voiced aloud, I often thought, "Why did this have to happen to me? Why can't I just live a normal life, with normal parents?" As the chemo and therapy continued and my perfect world decaying before my eyes, I developed an indifference to my family that was insensitive, disrespectful, and at the very least, bitter.
One Saturday afternoon I was preparing for a piano recital that evening, my dad slept on the couch in the family room. He had fallen asleep hours before, as he had done for several weeks now. But when he woke up, something was wrong... He was not lucid, talked with a lisp, and had the wide-eyed look of a lost child. As I stared at him lying there, I felt the final shards of my perfect world shatter to dust. In front of me, my Baba-the very same person who was once my pillar of strength-now barely remembered who I was, much less my name. And I saw, for the first time in my life, his tears.
The hour drive to the hospital was a blur, as was the rush into the emergency room. I recall my father's moans, my mother's panic, and myself staring at the closed double doors of the emergency room as I waited for the diagnosis. When my mom finally pulled me into the room, my father lay unconscious on the bleached hospital bed, strapped up to a heart monitor and IV drips as the doctor gently explained that Baba's delusions were caused by a severe dehydration of the cells in his brain, an issue that, though serious, was easily fixable. My mother was pulled aside to sign some forms as I mechanically walked around the room, observing the patients on beds and in wheelchairs, the whiteness of the room suffocating. A boy two curtains over looked no older than ten, yet a thick white gauze wrapped his head as he quietly slept. On the opposite wall, a bald middle-aged woman tucked under white sheets murmured to her doctor, only her hands visible as they weakly grasped the cold metal bars beside her. I turned back to my father, with his gaunt face turned sideways, nearly translucent in the harsh lighting. A fear boiled up inside me and I ran out, desperate to escape.
I frantically darted across the hospital lobby until I found an empty seat. As I moved my hand to brush the hair from my eyes, I felt wetness. I was crying. I was crying so silently that I almost wasn't crying at all.
Until that afternoon, I had been engraving my childhood in my memory like picture snapshots of a perfectly normal childhood. But that day, those few hours, will never fade into the blurriness of wistful remembrance. I sat there, motionless, and begged: Why? What wrong did that boy do to end there? What horror did that woman commit to suffer that? And Baba? My own father? They struggle to live, while I selfishly take life for granted...
I was humbled, for I had lost before but never suffered the agony that came with it. I had suffered before, but never summoned the will to fight to live, and I was pained, for I could not truly share my father's suffering. I received that pain, finding that I had an unlimited capacity to not only feel, but act for, if not with, my father, if I allowed myself. That day I found something in me, something that had always been there, but something I had never realized was there before. That day I learned that although my perfect world no longer existed, I still had a world to work my hardest in to make the best of what I have, and beyond it. I could still live and laugh and love in this new world, adapting to the ups and downs and becoming stronger from each. Most of all, my mother was still my Mama, my father was still my Baba, and we were still together. That day I finally let go of the scraps of childhood I had desperately clung to; that day I was finally ready to embrace the future. And as I walked out of those double doors into the hospital lobby, I felt much older...but more alive than I ever had before.
