• The salmon colored walls were all my eyes could see as I breathed in the disturbing smell of the waiting room: a smell beyond cleanliness, a smell I would soon come to hate- the smell of death.

    I attempted to focus my mind on plans for Thursday, wondering where my family would go for Thanksgiving, if we would even have one at all. I would have wondered whether the sky were purple just to keep my thoughts away from the bitter truth I knew was coming.

    The door opened, and the surgeon walked in. My aunts, uncles, father, and I crowded around him in silent fear, but the look on the doctor's face told me what I needed to know; it was the look of guilt that taints the face of a bearer of bad news.

    Even before I heard that deep voice say "malignant," tears welled up in my eyes, blurring my vision. As my mother's doom for the next year, and maybe the rest of her life, was named, I looked up into my father's eyes- I looked at them. I could never have looked in his eyes; I barely even knew the man I called daddy. He worked all the time and was never really there for me to know.

    What I saw in my father's eyes scares me still, today: pools of sadness, fear, and, above all, love for my mother. The three emotions swirled into two dark brown galaxies of despair staring at the surgeon, begging him to be mistaken or lying. As much as I wished the same then, I am grateful for it now, because the threat to my lifestyle was what made me live.

    Of course, even with a full mastectomy, my mother had to take treatment for the cancer. Chemotherapy was no easy task, for her or me. Every time she took one treatment, a trip to the hospital was inevitable, and she took treatment every three weeks. Because of her sickness, I basically had to do everything on my own, including getting my dad up in the morning and getting him ready for work. I cried countless times alone, in the dark, with no one to really pull me through. Daddy never got home until after I was in bed, and both of my sisters lived too far away to even know. It was then that I realized that I had been jerked out of my adolescence, and I was past the point of return- I could never go back to my carefree childhood.

    When mom was home, I could not even think of crying or letting her see how weak I was. My mama was the one who was always there for me, the one who I could talk to about anything- my friend. What would happen if she died? She came so close to death so many times in the hospital, and I couldn’t even go see her for the fear I would get her sick. I stopped crying. As cold as it sounds, I got used to the fact she could die, and distanced myself so It could not hurt me.

    But now, looking back on it, I cry even more because I know I can never go back. If I did, I don’t even know if I would change her illness for my own sake, because her cancer is what taught me how to grow up and really live, no matter how hard responsibility can be. I wish I never had to smell death again, but then, there is always going to be another trip to the hospital.