When calamities are introduced to one‘s life, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue living in a normal manner or View the world in the same realm as seen before the hardship. Just when life can‘t get any worse, one has to prove that more can be balanced on their plate. It was when life wasn’t going in my preferred direction during my sophomore year of high school that I found out my father had stage 3 colorectal cancer. There seems to be an upper power that enjoys testing the limits of everyday people. If this phenomenon did not exist, the relationship between my family and I would be completely different. My sophomore year started out rough; my favorite dog escaped while my family and l were eating dinner and got hit by a car. The following week was when my mom got laid off because the company she had been working for was privatizing.
I thought unfortunate things like this in life happened to everyone at one point and if we worked together, we would persevere and make it through. However not long before Thanksgiving, the news of my father came out. ldidn‘t know what to make of it, the news was too surreal to believe. I had numbed out the term “cancer” because years before, my uncle passed away from lung cancer. I saw how this made my mother and I didn’t want it to have the same effect on myself. At first, I tried my best to not think about it too much, but when I saw the pain he was going through during his busy surgery and chemotherapy schedule, I knew that ignoring this like everything was going well was inappropriate and that I had to step up and support my family. We made the best of our holidays and tried our best to stay positive because the winter can be draining to get through. I realized quickly that my family structure was changing. With both parents being out of work, normal situations were stressful.
I was driving my father to chemo treatments, shoveling the driveway, paying for my own gas and experiencing life with a different viewpoint. I became less reliant on my parents and my maturity levels increased profoundly because I felt it was my duty to not be problematic. This process strengthened the bond shared between my family and It We overcame the battle together to prove that we could handle it even with the previous setbacks. “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong”, right? Just when one thinks that life can’t get any worse, they need to keep in mind that the worst might have yet to come. My family and I experienced this first-hand, but over the course of that winter, our family structure was transformed I found my role in my family and realized that staying in a childish shell wasn’t an option. Our family bond grew immensely and we’ve never been closer. Remember that the event that changed your life forever is deeply personal, and its significance lies in your own interpretation and response to it.
