Hi, I've written more than one essay for the common app, but I'm at a loss to which one to use!! I think I'm going through that almost deadline phase where I'm panicking that everything I've written sounds terrible, so if you could critique this essay, that would be much appreciated. Thanks so much!
#1) Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
The first time I encountered death, I was four. My grandfather had passed away from lung disease after spending his last year in the hospital. What I know of him comes from photo albums, family stories, the faint memory of cigarette smoke, and the Da Bai Tu (Big White Rabbit) candies he would give me whenever we visited him. Even though I was too young to remember his funeral, my otherwise exuberant childhood was punctuated with solemn trips to the cemetery to burn incense and spirit money offerings, plant flowers, and wash the bird poop off of the granite gravestone. As I grew up, unconsciously, I would never look at the name of the graveyard - to this day, I only know that it is some "Memorial Cemetery." Perhaps it was the anxious feeling that pervades the hush of entering a necropolis, a place where thousands of past personalities and experiences have been laid to rest, that made me find somewhere else to fixate my eyes as we drove past the cemetery gates.
The first time I truly thought about my own death, I was twelve. Seventh grade biology had its scintillating moments: we simulated the effects of acid rain by pouring an acidic solution on bean sprouts we had made to germinate and watched grow. It took three days for the brown spots to appear, and two weeks passed as we took notes in our lab books on how plants wither and die. I went home one day, and as was my habit in the fall, I grabbed a snack and a book and biked to the park. Sitting on the swings, chewing on a turkey sandwich, I mulled over brown spots. I knew that I was going to age. I was going to age and then some day I would die. I looked at the fine lines on my hands, and I furrowed my eyebrows. The lines seemed to me like cracks in my body that would widen into those gorges called wrinkles. The wrinkles seemed to me like they would give way to nothingness, to chasms where I did not exist anymore. And when I did not exist anymore, it seemed to me like a waste. A waste of effort, of time, of existence. But if I was a waste, then why did I love reading so much? Why did I want to finish this book, knowing that my knowledge of it would be lost once I was gone? Finally giving up on trying to see into the cracks, I finished eating and opened my book to read other fine lines, ones that formed words, had meaning, and made sense.
I had not realized it then, but in retrospect, it was in that moment that I also understood that while death was very much a part of being alive, it did not matter in the least nor have meaning. Life cannot be lived in the shadow of what comes after it; Death has no meaning that is not derived from life. In Chinese we call it wu ya zui to mention death; "Shush!" my parents say, "Don't be like the boy who cried wolf with your wu ya zui. What if it comes true?" Most people say they do not fear death, yet still uncomfortably avoid mentioning it. I finally grasped that it was not so much the dying that perturbs us, but the aging. The feeling of time slipping away. Looking back near the end, the only way to have peace is to be satisfied with what you have done with your time, what you have accomplished. I underwent a paradigm shift: no longer was childish hedonism enough; I wanted to know what satisfaction of the soul was, rather than that of the body. They say acid rain has contributed to global warming, decreases in global health, and the extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals. But who knew acid rain could also strengthen a teenager's resolve to search for purpose and fulfillment?
As John Keats once wrote, "Some say the world is a vale of tears,/ I say it is a place of soul-making." Life is not a traveler's road to death. I have learned to absorb the sheer feelings of life, because each feeling is a craftsman's tool to shape the soul. When I broke my leg skiing, it was painful but exhilarating. When my grandmother passed away in March, it was heartrending, but my heart is still in one piece. When I have Da Bai Tu candies, I savor the saccharine taste. When my fine lines really do deepen, my soul will still be intact. Where the soul may go after the body is gone, who knows? The question is if I have done all that I can to cultivate it.
