When I was 16 I thought I was on top of the world and never imagined that I could lose a parent at such a young age. I was not prepared for the obstacles I would face in the days, weeks, and years that followed. Many nights were spent wondering if what I was doing in my life would make my dad proud, or how everything would be different if he was still here.…
When my step father committed suicide, it was the most shocking yet influential experience of my life. The whole situation expanded my understanding of mortality, spirituality, and of just how fragile happiness is. I can still remember the day that it happened; It was unlike any other day. I was in school when brother picked me up after lunch. We met up with my mother, and brother at my grandmother's house. The entire atmosphere was off. No one was acting like themselves. Immediately I knew something was wrong, even if their expressions and body language were not obvious enough. After sitting in the living room for what seemed like an eternity, I went into the next room where I found my mother who was crying, and when I asked what was wrong…
I lost my father seventeen years ago. While I grew up with my father, I did not know him because of the emotional distance. While he was a wonderful provider, a devout Christian, I knew him as a strict disciplinarian. The heart-to-heart connection was unfortunately missed and he was a stranger to me.…
Freedom Writers is a movie that tells the story of how a teacher, Erin Gruwell influences the education and lives of a group of students at a very diverse high school. As a novice to the classroom Mrs. Gruwell struggles to discover how to help impact her class deemed as misfits, and students who are incapable of learning. In beginning to understand the life stories and environments of the students she is able to connect with them as an educator, and meet the students where they are. Furthermore she gears their learning towards the person in the environment and sees their potential beyond the classroom. Intertwining the characters of the movie are the concepts of grief and loss. In order to gain a clinical perspective on how the students in Mrs. Gruwell’s class move towards success, one must understand their journey towards a level of restitution. Grief and loss as a concept of this non fictional story is best understood through: a definitive knowledge of grief and loss, the losses experienced by the characters, and the interventions that are applicable to persons experiencing loss.…
Suddenly, I woke to the sound of pain and stress. In the dimmed hotel room, my mother was laid roughly on the bed motioning that she didn’t feel well. We had traveled the far and exciting journey to Las Vegas to witness my mom finish a half marathon. It was an event that she had spent minutes, hours, days, and months training for. I couldn’t believe that after all of the work my mom had done in the past year, she wouldn’t be able to compete on the big day. I was wrong though when my mom sat up, tidied her tangled hair and nonchalantly said, “let’s do this”.…
Almost everyone in the world experiences an event which can be considered as a loss. It is the disappearance of something or someone important to an individual, grief is the natural response to the loss, people feel a range of emotions when they suffer a loss such as shock, panic, denial, anger and guilt. Death is one of the major events associated with loss but there are many others that occur which can also have a negative effect on someone’s life by impacting in various ways.…
Grief is a natural feeling to loss. Throughout our life we will all experience some form of loss whether it be the loss of a loved one to something as simple as losing your phone or your keys.…
Three years ago, I came into a world full of dreams, but these dreams can take you down if you don’t pay good attention. I am the first born in my family. Before I came here, I was so afraid to come to a new country, which I didn’t know any thing about. I was somehow confused, and the biggest fear that I had was about adapting to a new culture. After some days of being at home, I was taken to school where I met so many student, teachers, and other nonteaching staff. Although I didn’t know anyone, all the people I met welcomed me, and I really appreciated the welcome. The school counselor called one of the students and told him to show me my classes. Then the boy took me to my new class, and when I entered, all eyes were on…
One of the greater struggles in life is having to gather your belongings and move across the state into a different house. Packing your bags and moving 5,000 miles away to a different country is a lot harder. When I was only eight years old, I bid a farewell to my family and hoped on a plane from Sao Paulo to New York City. There, my step-father greeted my mother and I with a warm welcome and a long drive to Indiana. Although the transition from a city lover to a small-town girl was difficult, the obstacle that set me back the most was the language barrier. As I started school in the United States, I found myself to be very excluded from others. Not knowing the Pledge of Allegiance or understand anything in my classroom made me feel very homesick and embarrassed.…
I was born in Cuba in 1993 to two fifteen year olds Ariel Roman and Brudys Garcia. My mom at age fifteen was breastfeeding while her friends were graduating from high school. The first six years I lived in Cuba are a bur. In fact, I only remember holding my mothers hand and waving goodbye to my grandmother through a distant glass mirror as tears were streaming down her tanned cheeks. A week later, I was in a classroom full of posters of apples and some writing that was not in Spanish. In about three months, the posters read, “Spelling words, Classroom behavior, Nouns, Verbs and Math.”…
Throughout my life I have encountered many circumstances that have shaped me into the person I am today. I was born in Moroleon, Guanajuato, Mexico. I attended school in Mexico all the way to second grade. In the summer of 2006 I moved to Cumming, Georgia. It was the hardest thing to do because I left everything that I care the most about. We lived in a trailer which was not the nicest place and in the middle of the forest. I started school at the beginning of August. I had always loved school so I was so excited for the first day. I knew it was going to be hard because I would have to conquer so many obstacles on the way. At this time the only English I knew was probably counting from one to ten and some of the colors. My Father knew some…
Some nights I dream about Michael. He’s coming home from college for christmas break and he’s brought a girl with him. Our family is sitting at the dinner table and he’s giving my sister’s new boyfriend a hard time. He’s sitting in the audience, whooping and hollering as I walk across the stage and receive my diploma. Other times, he’s standing in a waiting room, introducing my sisters and me to his little girl. I dream about all of the moments my family and I never got to have with him and my heart breaks every single time. Michael has been gone for almost 16 years and yet he is still with me every day. I dream about him and what could have been; what should have been. Michael’s death teaches me something new almost every day. I have learned what loss is, how to deal with it, and how to grow from it.…
When I was about 4-5 I learned what death was, and it terrified me. Death has scared me even though I am many years away from it I would think about death and it would terrify me. Luckily a lot of times in movies when people died I knew it was fake, so it did not scare me as much, it was when I thought about my family dying and dying myself. This fear caused me to decide to live forever. I came up with all sorts of crazy ideas. Even if they would never work, I kept thinking about them and it consumed me. It kept me from living my own life. That lasted up until I was in my 2nd year of homeschooling. I was in 5th grade, and I was given the choice of picking a book from a selection of grade level books. I saw Tuck Everlasting and I decided to check it out. At first when I saw it, it was talking about death and I was pulled in only for the hope that I would get a genius idea for immortality.…
Looking back, making a transition from place to place is nothing new to me. When I was eight, my mom left China and came to the United States to create a better life for my younger brother and me. As a result, my brother and I would have a better opportunity at education. My dad did not have time to take care of us because he had a business to run. Therefore, my family decided to let our teachers take care of us temporarily. We left our small town, and stayed at our teachers’ houses, for eight years. Every year, we had a new teacher; so, we had to move to a totally different environment. I had not only to take care of myself, but also my younger brother. I knew that I had to be stronger; there was no one to take care of me when I got sick; to pick me up when I missed the bus; or show up to every parent-teacher conference. Compared to my peers, I was more mature because I had understood, at an earlier age, that I could not increase my parents’ burden. Gradually, I became more and more independent. As the years passed, I had gained the ability to face situations alone.…
Many of the things that we have talked about in class were illustrated for me in…