and Worse for Those It Leaves Behind

My whole life, death has been a distant thing to me. It is not even really a thing, but more of an idea. I have heard about death millions of times with the media. Everyday in the news, people are dying left and right with disease in the foreign countries, famine in distant lands, and even murder in the suburbs. I even heard about it a few times from my friends when they told me about their recent loses. With all of these stories of "tragedy" and awful accidents, I never felt any emotion. The news reporter's sympathy for these victims was not convincing enough to make me think that something tragic had happened, or my elementary school friend did not understand the situation himself in order to feel pain. If something was truly awful about the story, it was too far away for me to consider it a reality.

When I was about eight years old, I experienced the first death in my family. My father's sister had died and my he got a call soon after. I was in the room when the phone rang and my dad answered the phone. He first sounded excited to hear the voice on the other end, but that happiness soon turned to devastation. His only sister h

The event in my life that brought me to the realization of death's importance and the point I am at now was my grandfather's death. About three and a half years ago my grandfather was at the hospital for a back problem and was diagnosed with cancer. He was a heavy smoker and had been for many years. The cancer was appropriately in his lungs, brain, and throat. They gave him slim chances for survival, but he eagerly took those odds. As the Chemotherapy began to take its toll on his body, his head was completely bald and he was very weak. This condition was very hard for him, being a hard working ex-military officer. While he was going through all of these treatments and being worn down by the disease, our family made every effort to be there. We would visit over Christmas, summer, and spring break. We all wanted to be there for him, as he became more and more helpless. As this progressed, he began to look less and less like the person I knew before this. He looked more and more ghostly every day. I believe that this was another way that life tries to ease the pain of those who know and love death's victims. By the time that my grandfather died, I would not have recognized him if I hadn't seen the stages in between. Although this could have been another excuse for me to pretend that tragedy wasn't really happening, I refused to let it. I accepted what was happening to my grandfather.

About four years ago, I had my first realization of the power of death. This was a slight taste of what death really meant, but it came at a huge cost for others. It all started one day in the middle of summer. I was downstairs watching the television while my older sister and her friend were hanging out upstairs. We all heard a few pops that sounded a lot like small firecrackers that came from outside. I disregarded this noise as neighborhood children messing around, but my sister and her friend went outside to investigate. The sight that they found would change their lives. On a street near our house, there was a car parked on the side of the road and a man lying on the sidewalk. The two ran over to see what had happened, but what they

Some common words found in the essay are:
Worse Leaves, life movie, sister friend,
Approximate Word count = 1453
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)