In his own words

Editor’s note: This essay is part of the first Write-A-Thon project students at Colony Middle School completed last year. Principal Mary McMahon said the school plans to publish this essay and 73 others drafted that day as part of a new book called “With These Hearts & Hands: Journeys of the CMS Knight Writers,” which is expected to be available for purchase by January 2011. The essays will be published without student names to allow the young adults to tell their stories freely.

Important people

I sat on my sister’s bed on that cold, damp night with all of my family hovering over me like a warm, protective blanket. My mother told me the worst thing I had ever heard.

“Daddy … daddy crashed his plane on his way home. He is gone in heaven now,” she whimpered.

I watched my mom try to hold back the tears that were slowly trickling down her face. From feeling and hearing the loud echoing wails from my siblings in the room, I began to weep. I cried, and I cried, and I cried, tears flew down my face like a raging ocean tossing and turning in the wind.

I thought to myself, Why? Why me?

My mother came to me, putting me in her arms. When I was next to her, I felt as if nothing could penetrate me. I felt as if I was inside a tower with 1,000-foot ramparts all around me.

She said to me faintly, “It’s going to be OK, I’m still here, and I always will be.”

Even at the age of 4, I still realized how sincere she really was. I lay down in my bed, pondering over my dad’s death.

The next couple of days, all of my near and distant relatives started to fly in, one after another. Each day seemed as if it was a whole year passing by. I saw every single one of their faces etched in sorrow. When all of my aunts and uncles arrived, they wanted to play games with me like nothing ever happened.

I thought to myself, I don’t want to play games; all I want is my dad.

I yearned for him. I wanted to get one of his big hugs and then see a flash of his warm, comforting smile.

Three days after the death of my dad, I sat on my stiff, lumpy seat at the funeral. I glanced around me and saw sadness. I could only think about the day he died. The memory flooded into my mind as if the dam of thoughts in my head broke free. It was a cool, windy day on one of Alaska’s remote rivers. The sun was just beginning to rise over the peaceful, delicate mountains.

The grass reached full growth, greener than ever. My dad, my three siblings and I were fishing with our cousins from Wisconsin. We only caught one fish, but it was an astonishing red and silver 25-inch salmon, and it was about 29 pounds. After we were done fishing, my dad, the pilot, loaded half of the group into a small, blue-and-white Bush plane.

When we finally ventured our way through the dull, gray skies, we landed on the lake that we lived on and taxied toward our dock. After the plane was all tied up to the dock, we started to unload our equipment and said our brief goodbyes to my dad before he left to pick up the others. Right about the time he was climbing in to the small plane, he yelled to me, “I love you, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Trying to stretch my voice loud enough so that he could hear over the piercing roaring of the engine, I exclaimed, “I love you, too.”

I didn’t quite know it yet, but from the moment he took off, it was going to be the last time I would ever see him alive. He was gone. … He would never be there to shoot hoops with me in the front yard or help me with my homework when I didn’t know what to do, or even simply drive me to school or see me graduate. When he died, it changed my life dramatically.

As a result of my dad’s death, I now truly understand that you really don’t know how special someone is to you, until they’re gone.

Many times, I think to myself saying, Man, I really should have done some of the things he asked me to and been more respectful to him. Now I know to cherish my time with my family and the people I love, because I will never know when they will be gone.