April 20th

April 20th- Cassey Higgins (Laurel School 11th Grade) 

“Honey, Dad’s not doing so well,” Mom says from the other room. I look up from my

phone for a moment before responding.

“Okay?” I reply. He’s been having panic attacks for weeks. I’m not really sure why, but

that’s what I assume Mom means. Mom and I just got back from a weekend trip to New York to

visit her parents and her brother. I had fun; I miss them so much already. I continue to scroll on

my phone and text my friends until I hear my mom call out for me again.

“Honey, I need you to go downstairs and tell the concierge to open the door for the

paramedics.” She says through tears. I hear a voice coming from her phone through the locked

door of the guest room.

“What?” I shoot up from my bed and hastily walk over. Panic shoots through my body as

I hear her continue to talk to the person on the phone, whom I immediately assume to be a 911

operator. “I—okay.” I unlock the door and rush out into the hallway. As fear sets in, I begin to

run. I run down the hallway faster than I ever have before. In record time, I reach the front

elevators and mash the button as hard as I can.

“Please, please, please,” I mutter to myself. “Come on.” The doors open, and luckily,

there’s no one inside. If there was, I would either have to pretend like nothing’s happening or let

my panic show on my body and pray that they don’t ask. I run inside and hit “L” for lobby. Then,

I press the “Close door” button.

“Come on, please.” The elevator feels like it’s going less than a mile an hour. I hear

sirens in the distance and slide to the ground, clutching my shirt. They’re for Dad. Those are for

my dad.

Finally, I reach the lobby and run out to a startled concierge. “My mom said to open the

front doors because paramedics are coming.” I say, “For my dad.” The young concierge—she

couldn’t be over thirty—springs into action and types away at her computer and unlocks the

door. I honestly feel bad; she looks scared. I mean, I get it. I’d be scared too if a girl who lives in

the building ran out of the elevator at Mach twenty to tell me her dad’s probably dying. She

walks off to do something else, and I sit down, my back against the lobby desk, while I wait for

the blaring sirens to reach my street.

Once they’re loud enough that I can hear them ringing in my ears, I take the lobby

elevator down to the ground floor to “greet” the paramedics.

Odd. There’s a fire truck outside instead of an ambulance. I’m so confused. I take the

group of about four or five men upstairs and walk down the hallway back to my apartment. I

don’t know why I’m walking; I just really don’t know what’s going on. Mom hasn’t told me a

thing.

We reach my house, and I open the door for them. I hear Mom hang up her phone. The

paramedics tell me not to go inside the guest room. I watch them enter the room. I strain my ear

to find out what’s going on, and what I hear shocks me to my core.

“—No pulse.”

No pulse. My dad has no pulse. This can’t be real, right? I’m just having a nightmare. A

really bad, realistic nightmare? I clutch onto the corner of the counter, trying to steady myself. I

leave the house and text Mom that I’m going upstairs. Upstairs is my old house, where my aunt

and uncle live. They aren’t blood-related, but they’re so close to us that they’re practically

family.

I knock on their door, and they open it, already being aware of what’s going on thanks to

Mom somehow texting them in the middle of the chaos. I sit down on one of their big, comfy

chairs while Aunt Julia gets me a glass of water. What’s happening hasn’t set in yet. I make jokes

and talk about other things with them. They’re both scared, too; I can see it on their faces. As

much as they’d like to hide it, we’re all terrified.

What feels like hours pass, and Uncle Matt gets a text on his phone. He and Mom have

been texting back and forth while Julia and I talk.

“Shit,” he mutters.

“What, is my dad dead?” I say as a joke. He doesn’t respond and rushes out the door.

When he comes back, my mom is with him. Tears run down her face. Julia gets up so my

mom can sit next to me, and Matt and Julia go into their bedroom to talk. I hear him tell her

something, and she begins to sob. I look at my mom, her eyes red with tears.

“Mom?”

“Honey, Dad, he—" she takes in a deep breath—"He didn’t make it.”

Time feels like it stops. Tears well up in my eyes, and I begin to cry harder than I ever

have in my entire life. Mom pulls me into a hug, and we cry together. I take turns crying alone in

my old bedroom, crying with Julia, and hugging my mom. I text my friends, and they do their

best to help and support me. One even calls me the second she finds out to console me.

Eventually, Mom asks me if I want to see him for closure. I say yes. I wish I didn’t. We

take the elevator back down. The second we walk into the house, the air feels thick. Wrong.

Police officers are standing in my house. One outside the room, one inside. Mom tells them my

decision. They ask me if I’m sure. I say yes. My dad is sprawled out on the floor with a sheet

over his body. I can see his right leg still half on the guest bed. He loves napping there since

there aren’t any windows. We call it “the cave.” The police officer in the room pulls back the

sheet. What stares back at me is a grotesque version of my dad’s face. Mom warned me his face

would be “a little” gray, but what I see is beyond a little. His face is blue and gray, his eyes

closed. His arm is still in a sling; he had surgery on his arm a few weeks ago. I don’t remember

what it was for. I immediately sob again and run out of the room, hitting the wall with my body.

“That’s not him, that’s not him!” I cry over and over again. “No!” The officer stationed

outside the room looks at me somberly. Mom holds me and starts to take me out of the house.

Dad’s face is already covered again.

The officer outside only says, “I’m sorry.” Through tears, I thank them for being here.

Mom later explains that they were there because, since he was a young and relatively healthy

man, dying at only fifty-six with no discernible reason, they had to open an investigation.

I texted my dad’s phone over and over again that night. I looked at photos of him and me

together. It was so sudden; no one was prepared for him to go, not even him.

As I write this, it has been one hundred and seventy-four days since my dad died. I wish I

could say I counted, but no, I googled it. I just know it’s been almost six months. His death

rocked me. It popped the bubble of what I thought was a “regular family.” I wasn’t ready for him

to die yet. He and Mom were supposed to retire together and travel the world. They never got to.

I refuse to let his death define me. After he passed, I felt like I was only known at my

school for being the girl whose dad died. Sometimes I still feel like it.

The day before junior year started, during orientation, we had an activity where everyone

had a sheet of paper on their backs, and people would write on them anonymously. I was

surprised at how many people asked to write on mine. One person wrote, “brave.” I think they

wrote that because of what I went through.

Now, I’m sixteen years old. I started junior year, I turned sixteen, and I’m on my way to

getting my driver’s license. Mom struggled for a while, but I think she’s doing better. I got a cat

about a month and a half after he passed. Her name is Juniper, and I love her more than anything.

She’s my best friend. My sassy little weirdo. I talk about Dad a lot. People don’t always like it.

Grief is awkward to those who haven’t experienced it. Everyone around me has been so kind,

though. A few people even got me care baskets. I appreciate them so much. I’m still my own

person, even after I lose someone who means so much to me. I like to say that my dad will never

truly die if I’m still around. If his friends and family are. All of us have a piece of him in us. He

influenced so many people. I’m doing a ton of clubs right now. I love all of them, but it’s hard

for me to run around and get everything done. I’m doing my best in school, though I struggle

sometimes. I keep my dad’s ring—well, one of them; he kept losing them—on a chain around

my neck most of the time. It’s a way to keep him with me, no matter what I’m doing.

I want to be a journalist when I grow up. I guess I’m already on my way to growing up. I

want to own a few cats and live in an apartment somewhere in a bustling city. Life keeps going,

and time keeps moving. The clock never stops, and I’ve learned to accept that. I love to play

video games, especially with my friends. My mom usually has to shut my bedroom door since

we’re screaming so loudly at a horror game or because someone killed us in a fighting game. If

this essay was meant to be of a complex character, then I’m the most complex one I’ve got. But

I’m not defined by my dad’s death. Nor am I defined by my chronic illness. Or my interests.

Nothing truly “defines” me. Everything is a puzzle piece, and when you put them together, you

get me. I am the complexity of a puzzle, but when you break the puzzle down, you get pieces.

And those pieces aren’t the puzzle themselves; they make it up.