"This I Believe: Time" by Jessie

This December, Advanced Composition students studied, wrote, and recorded audio essays. Students wrote and recorded their own "This I Believe" essays inspired by the weekly This I Believe Podcast. 

“Your dad is in the hospital.” Realization struck as I sat down at the table in my grandmother’s house.  Earlier that day I had a sense something was wrong, something I could just feel. An eerie feeling when my mom told me that Jamie, my best friend Joanie’s mom, was going to pick me up after school.  When I stepped into Jamie’s car she said she didn’t know why my mom wasn’t home. At that point I finally was certain something bad had happened. There was no way my mom would ask her to pick me up and not clue Jamie in on what was happening.

When Jamie dropped me off at my grandma’s house instead of my own, I braced myself. As I walked through the door I was taken aback by how normal my grandma was acting. Trying to stay calm I asked what could possibly be going on when she told me then news. My dad had a seizure and that’s all the doctors seemed to know. My dad has his own electrical company and had been at a job when he started feeling weird, and collapsed. Fast forward 6 hours, and everyone was still so confused on why he had this seizure. It took almost five months for doctors to realize that the seizure was triggered by a tumor in his brain that is cancerous.

Those long months were hard and even afterwards the realization is hard to wrap my mind around. After the fact, realizing that my dad could have had a seizure while driving and died is what hit home. The thought of how much worse things could have gone is what led me to this conclusion of appreciation.

The idea of not taking people for granted is so simple and it’s something that has been said a lot over the years. I think every family feels as if they truly do show how much one another means to them. That’s what I thought too, and it took this incident to realize how wrong I was. No one can be “ready” for something as detrimental as this was. As I constantly was waiting for news about my dad, millions of things I hadn’t told him yet went through my mind. It was scary to think that that’s all they would ever be, thoughts in my mind.

I have learned to stress the idea of not letting anything go unsaid. The idea to appreciate the time you have with others. I believe in not taking time for granted. Time on this earth is limited and a special thing. You never know when someone’s’ time will run out and how much longer you have to say everything you need to. No longer will I allow my fears to leave anything unsaid, because even if it is hard to say I know it would be harder to live with it never being said at all.