ENGL 110
Composition I
23 July 2012
Losing Someone to Cancer
In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “accustomed to the dark”, she describes going through hard times when losing a special person and knowing everything will be okay as things “Adjust itself to midnight and life steps almost straight.” She sets up a situation where losing someone to a life threatening situation or a disaster. Its easier to ignore the truth and live in fear but once we get over our doubts, though its difficult we can change the darkness to light. We can live in truth and in goodness but it is scary, suffer through much and sometimes there are consequences but living the right way in truth without fear is worth the journey of getting there.
It all began in July 2005 when she was 45 years old. I remember walking in the front door after school and seeing my aunt crying. I was completely shocked, as I had never seen her cry before. She then sat me down and explained to me that she had a number of tumors. At first this didn’t mean much to me as I was too young to understand the extent of her illness, but as time went on I slowly began to understand. As time passed she became quite sick, and was soon transferred to a hospital.
Sadly a few years after that, she passed away after putting up a strong fight for just over 15 months. It took me a while to come to terms with my aunt’s death; however the support given to me from my friends and family helped me tremendously. For the following months I attended a number of different events through the support organization, which helped me get my life back on track. But just as my life seemed to be getting back to normal again, my uncle was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of cancer, just 6 months after his wife had died. Once again my family and I would have to endure another long battle. As the months went by I was forced to watch my uncle endure a lot of suffering.
This brought back numerous memories of my aunt’s illness.