When I was twelve, my father was diagnosed with one of the worst diseases Ive seen in my life: colon cancer. My younger half brother was only two at this point and I didnt know whether to be mad at the world or to go cry in a corner alone...so I did both. Three months short of my sixteenth birthday my father died. April 24, 1998. A day I will never forget. My baby brother was hardly five years old and he was now completely, unalterably fatherless. Four months after my fathers death we found out that my grandmother and aunt (his mother and sister) were suing, yes suing me and my five year old brother. The hows and whys of this dont really matter at this point because everything is done and over, but still the pain remains.

I, at the age of fifteen, watched my father go through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. I watched him die, slowly and painfully...moving from a healthy, vibrant man of fifty to a weak, infantile-like 86 pound skeleton. Images like this flicker through my mind. Things like this you cannot forget. I wasnt there when my father died, but I held his hand before it. While the copious amounts of morphine rushed through his body, I cried. I cried the hot, burning tears of someone who is about to lose the most important thing in their universe. I cried like one who has forgotten about God and lost sight of his mercy. I cried because I was losing the best thing in my life. When the tears would come no more, I sank into an intense, almost coma-like stage. This is the part where you feel numb. You can feel nothing, but the huge, gaping hole where your heart once was. I stood out on the porch that spring day and saw things moving all around me, yet nothing moved me.

I believe that you can never fully realize your love for someone until after theyre gone. Until youre staring at that empty chair during dinner, until they arent there to tell you they love you, until youre thinking you would give anything to hear a John Wayne movie on tv. Because of my love for my father, there are a lot of things I do and a lot of things I dont do. At the age of fifteen, I planned the newspaper obituary, I planned his funeral from the songs to the scripture, I collected that plastic box of his remains, carried it home in the brown paper bag they put it in, and felt that hole grow bigger and go deeper than any pain before. This is when you know theyre never coming back...and this is when you realize that everything you were before is gone...

This may sound unbelievable. This may sound fake, but THIS IS REAL. This is life as we know it. This is mine...and there is no turning back.