This I Used to Believe.

This post is a paper that I wrote for my English 2010 class. I just added pictures. The assignment was to write a personal persuasive essay. The prompt was this: You will write a 4- to 5-page essay using the prompt “This I used to Believe” as your topic. This essay should show how you or something about you has changed from one thing to another. Your goal is to persuade your reader. To persuade in a personal essay rather than a research essay is a little different. You're not trying to “convert” me to your point of view. What you want to do is write in a way that I can empathize with your decisions and experiences, with where you were and where you are now. Essentially, you want to demonstrate what persuaded you. By doing so, I will be persuaded also.

I wrote about my senior year of high school. It was the year that changed me most.

Often, the last year of one’s high school career is stereotyped as “the best year ever.” Sadly, that’s exactly what most teenagers expect out of their last year in grade school, and if their senior year is anything less than perfect, it might as well be their last year on earth. As a high school senior, I believed that I had the world in the palm of my hands. I expected my senior year to be the greatest year of my life. It’s rather humorous, that at the ripe old age of seventeen, I thought that I could do anything with the world, and that I could have everything in the world, and that nothing could stop me from taking over the world. It would have been nice to conquer the world, but I had absolutely no idea what the world actually had in store for me.

Illness is a funny thing. Funny in a malicious, evil, not so funny kind of way. Disease does things to us that nothing else can. It changes us in a way that only sickness can change us. It shapes us and molds us and alters our way of thinking. I am not sick, but someone I loved once was.

Someone I love still is.

Plans for my perfect senior year began long before the first day of school. My best friends and I absolutely refused to settle for anything less than wonderful. So, we began plotting our perfect final moments before the drill season was even close to being over during our Junior year. There were five of us, and we were practically sisters. We shared clothes, we shared houses on the weekends, and we even addressed each others parents as “mom” and “dad.” We all wanted the same things for our senior year, and we knew that because we loved each other so much, we would be able to work together to achieve everything that we had ever dreamed of.

We weren’t wrong.

In 2011, for the first time in Morgan High history, the Troyettes won the Region Drill Team Champion Title; it was my senior year and I was a member of that Troyette team. Honestly, it was a dream come true, and I could not have imagined a better year for my team. Unfortunately, my personal journey to winning the Region Title was not as perfect as I dreamt it would be.

In a stereotypical, perfect world, no one would have to die. But, what kind of world would that be? People would chose to live forever. The world would most likely be filthy and overpopulated by pompous, arrogant immortals. Who wants that? Death is sad, and it is not fun for anyone, but it is a necessary part of life. I believe that we are on this earth to live our lives as best as we can. We are on this earth to live, which would mean that we are also here to die.

In my world, there is nothing wrong with dying.

The first half of the summer before my senior year was fabulous. I spent almost every day at drill and I loved it. The days that I had off of drill were either spent with my four best friends or at the mall where I worked. My friends and I went on random road trips and we spent practically every waking moment with each other. Somewhere in the midst of the very little time not spent together, two of my best friends decided to get boyfriends. High school girls are pathetic when it comes to boys, and my friends started to ignore me. Luckily, they lovingly kept our shared dreams in mind, and they did not sacrifice those dreams and goals for their insignificant, short-lived, pointless love lives. Our friendships did not end, but they were damaged by the hurtful decisions that my two friends made at the end of that seemingly blissful summer.

Bad things happen to good people. It’s inevitable. I hear tragic stories too frequently, and more often than not, the recipient of the tragedy never expected something horrible to happen to them. The human mind is funny like this. I know that bad things happen to good people and I would like to believe that I am a good person, but I never imagined that I could be the victim of an unexpected, unfortunate, tragic event.

As the school year began, life seemed to be running smoothly for me. I still had my friends, I had a great family and I still had my drill team. The perfect path that I had imagined had been altered over the summer, but the alteration was not significant enough to completely destroy my perfect year.

My mom has been sick for a long time and not a single doctor can figure out what is wrong with her. I have lost count of the number of doctors that she has gone to see over the past couple of years. It’s to the point now, that we just don’t talk about my mom’s illness, because she likes it better that way. My mom’s body doesn’t like food. So, every time she eats, she usually gets sick. My uncle Mark had similar stomach problems, only his were much worse. Mark’s body didn’t like food at all, and his body refused to digest anything that he ate. To put it simply, his body was starving itself and there was almost nothing that anybody could really do about it. Doctors put him through stomach surgery numerous times. Every time his body would start to react positively to a surgery, something bad would happen, causing his health to spiral downward again. For as long as I can remember, my uncle Mark was sick and skinny.

I remember a Lake Powell trip that my family took when I was twelve. Mark had recently recovered from a major surgery that left a huge scar that ran from his sternum all the way past his belly button. At that time, I couldn’t fathom the possibility of living through something that required having your entire torso cut open. My uncle Mark was Superman. He was smaller than I was, even at the age of twelve, but he was my Superman.

Homecoming week is stereotyped as “the best week of the perfect year.” I was determined to make sure that Homecoming was wonderful my senior year. I went dress shopping with my friends and I found the perfect dress. We planned on playing powder puff football and on having a drill team made up of boys to perform at the powder puff half time. We were using shopping carts as our homecoming parade floats, and the drill team was performing the dance that I choreographed at the homecoming half time.

A combination of different health factors contributed to the fact that my aunt Hillari was unable to have a baby. Mark and Hillari wanted nothing more than to have a family of their own, and in 2009 their dreams came true when they were given the opportunity to adopt three beautiful children from Saipan.

I think that my uncle Mark knew that the summer of 2010 would be his last summer on earth. My family vacations in Lake Powell every year, and Mark was extra sick that year. He was being fed through a tube, but he came anyway to witness his little family’s first year at Powell. I will never forget the conversation that I had with my uncle the day he arrived.

“You look like shit.”

“I feel like shit,” he replied

I wondered aloud, “Why did you come? Are you insane?”

“You could say that, but I would rather be miserable here than miserable at home, alone.”

“I can respect that Marcus, but I just hope that you don’t die,” I joked.

His answer was serious although he attempted to keep the mood light, “Karlie,” he said, “let me tell you something important. I’ve been trying to die for a long time now, and God won’t let me. He won’t let you die until He wants you to, and as long as you continue to make stupid decisions, like me, He doesn’t want you to die, and He won’t let you.”

Two months later, on September 11, 2010, my uncle Mark passed away unexpectedly. It was the day of his daughter’s baptism. Family and friends were gathered at the church just fifty steps away from where Mark and Hillari lived. Mark had been put on some medication that was actually helping him to feel better. The one side-affect of the new medication was that it caused Mark to have seizures occasionally. Just before the baptism, Mark fell because of a seizure and hit his head, which ultimately led to his death.

Mark passed away exactly one week before the homecoming dance my senior year. Instead of spending every second possible with my friends, I spent most of my time with my family. I wasn’t the happiest person in the world that week, but when I was able to spend time away from the sadness, I did my best to be a pleasant person for the sake of the people around me. The viewing was scheduled for Wednesday night, which was the night of our powder puff game. I was sitting in a chair, crying and my aunt Hillari came up to me and she told me to leave.

“Leave? Are you serious?” I asked.

My aunt replied, “Yes, there will be enough crying tomorrow at the funeral. He would have wanted you to go and have fun. Make him proud.”

So I left. My face was not painted like the other girls’ faces. I decided that my puffy eyes were enough to scare the scrawny juniors away. I was able to participate in the last quarter of the powder puff game. I got some wicked tackles, and I even made a touchdown. It was all for Mark.

That sad Wednesday night ended up being not so sad after all. My aunt Hillari must have known that the remainder of my week would suck horribly and that I needed that one night away from the pain to help me through it. The funeral on Thursday was beautiful. Each of my mother’s siblings courageously approached the pulpit to tell stories of Mark’s life. The theme of the service can be summed up by saying that Mark lived each day like he was dying. He went sky diving, he swam with sharks, he climbed mountains and he did so much more. In the short time that he was allowed to spend here, he conquered the world.

 I went to the homecoming dance, but I paid for my own date. I knew that my uncle wouldn’t have wanted me to sit at home and cry, so since no one had asked me to go, I convinced a friend from another school to go with me. If it would have just been us, we would have had a lovely time. However, I blindly accepted a horrible challenge. I offered to find a date for my friend’s little sister. I should have just canceled, but last minute, I found her a date. I tricked my cousin to “do it for Mark,” and so, reluctantly, he came. I wish I would have chosen not to do that, because I ended up having to babysit a cat murderer all night long.

One week before Mark passed, he was told that his new medication was working and that he was on the road to recovery. Apparently, God had something else in mind. He wanted my uncle back sooner than we wanted to let him go and so He allowed Mark to die.

When my uncle told me that God wouldn’t let us die as long as we’re imperfect, I know that he was not hinting to me that I need to make mistakes in order to stay alive. My uncle Mark taught me the most valuable life lesson that I think I will ever learn. Life is precious, it is not something to be wasted, it’s not something to be taken lightly, and it is not something to wish away. Too many lives are taken away too soon and so many are taken completely unexpectedly.

My mom has always been my best friend, and I don’t know what I would do if I was to lose her. She has an illness that is relatively similar to the one that killed my dear uncle, and it scares me every day that her illness could potentially take her away from me as well.

After Mark passed away, my life seemed to keep crumbling beneath me. When I didn’t think that things could possibly get worse, they did. Everything that could have gone wrong in my life at that time did. I think about it now, and it all seems so insignificant especially compared to the things that my other family members were going through. But, I would not have been able to make it through my senior year alone.

My friends were not there for me like they should have been. We were sisters, and they did not treat me like a sister would have or should have. It was my real family who made all of the difference. Today, it is my family, not my friends, who continue to support me whenever I need them. My senior year was not ideal by any means, but as I look back on it now, I can honestly say that it was the best year of my life. It was not the perfect year that I imagined, but it ended up being a perfect year in ways that I never could have possibly imagined. I graduated high school with something so much more than a Region Drill Team Champion Title. I was given obstacles that caused me to pay attention to the most important things in my life, so that I would be able to take the time to develop strong relationships with all of the members of my family. I am so thankful for that, because my family is all that I need.