Dear My Not A Diary

“For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection on her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.”

Every day is a constant struggle for Vivian. The long months of treatment bring tremendous physical and mental suffering. Vivian admits, “One thing can be said for an eight-month course of cancer treatment: it is highly educational. I am learning to suffer” (31). Throughout the eight-month period, Vivian had to become accustomed to her disease because she knew it would be part of her chapter in life. Cancer is an austere battle that involves agony in the body as well as life. At the beginning of the play, Vivian already introduces her audience to a tragic ending by applying forshadow. She asserts, “I have been, at best, an unwitting accomplice. It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die at the end” (6). Vivian

the world isn’t always a beautiful place and the people in it have a dark side that isn’t pretty.

When Melinda Murphy was diagnosed with breast cancer, she first thought that death was inevitable. But soon, she was determined to fight through it. In the article, Melinda states that she “likened to cancer like an intruder who was coming into (her) home with plans of harming (her) children.” This shows that if Melinda “was going to strike out, (she) wasn’t just going

The world is filled with horrible, awful, and insane people. There is no doubt about it. For example, Adolf Hitler was a man who was more than just bad. He completely discriminated Jews and caused over six million of them to die. He caused the Holocaust and sent Jews to concentration camps where they would sit and starve until they eventually died.

     At the age of 48, she is diagnosed with stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer. Dr. Kelekian wants her to take eight high-dose experimental chemotherapy treatments for eight months. He warns her that she will need to be "tough" to rely upon large reserves of inner courage and willpower.

Hope is a very delicate species that requires a commitment. “The Radiologist stops, freezes one of the many swirls of oceanic gray, and clicks repeatedly, a single moment within the long, cavernous weather map that is the Baby's insides.” The mother’s compelling comparison of “swirls of oceanic gray” to a medical machine and “cavernous weather map” to her baby’s internal organs is depressing. Similarly to the weather and the ocean, cancer is endless. They continue to diverge and reappear. However, if one knows how to swim, they may be in luck as there is always a land or an anchor somewhere in the seemingly infinite distance of blue water. Moore continues to illustrate the mother’s longing to hold onto hope with additional metaphors later in the story. “It is old and thin, like a mashed flower saved from a dance; she dabs it at her eyes and nose.” The mother’s comparison of her old and thin tissue to a mashed flower demonstrates her clench onto hope. A flower from a dance is composed of not only a beautiful physique but of the joy and bliss that it donates to its receiver. A tissue might not have a physical quality; however, a tissue is composed of the faith that things will be better as the tissue sooths the tired eyes and the inflamed nose, allowing the crier to see life with a clearer sight.

I hold the paper in my hands. It’s crumpling under my grip, but in it I get to live in the footsteps of others. My old dress is wrinkled and torn much like the paper, but I can’t spare the money on a new one. As much as I try to focus on the crinkled piece of paper with scrawly handwriting, I can’t. I just can’t. Tears run down my face and I wipe them away. It has been awhile since I have cried, so long in fact that I was afraid that there was something wrong with me. I push myself up from the old oak I sit at the base of. There’s no use in dwelling in what I can’t change. I fold the paper back in my dress pocket and walk into the field. I used to think there was beauty in the way that the grass grows in the street; standing low next to the

She was impossible, but I loved her, though not enough to allow her to smoke indoors - so she'd grab the ashtray and sashay to the back garden, swinging her hips. You'd think she died of lung cancer - but no, she died of causes still unknown; she just never woke up. One day the picture of good health, despite her smoking, and dead the next day. No prolonged illness - no time to get used to the idea that she would be gone forever.

Every individual person has their own way of finding comfort in difficult situations. From finding comfort in simple things like eating a cupcake to harmful and unhealthy ways like self-harm. As readers read through Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, they witness the cruelty and pain Lucy goes through as she gets treated for her cancer and how it drastically changes her appearance and affects her whole life. When Lucy was young, before she was diagnosed with cancer, her comfort was being an excellent tomboy because she was a terrible athlete but a good gamer for casual and daring games. However, that all changed when her treatment for cancer started. Ever since then, Lucy’s life became full of pain, and she withstood that pain by taking comfort in certain things.

This all started after my dad’s funeral, I was about to leave the gloomy cemetery when I was told by this crazy nut job, that grabbed me and told me that I was going to die. If I don’t stay low for the next 365 days of my life, I thought he was crazy a week ago, but I’m starting to believe him. So far my farther has died somehow and now people after, my life is so hard as I’m still as I’m devastated but I have to watch my back

On 05-31-2016 at 1527 hours I was dispatched to 515 north 6th Street apartment 1 in reference to assault.

When I look at her I see myself moving away from all that I know and love like a blue whale swept from its cool ocean home to the hot sandy shore by an unexpected foamy wave. I see myself wearing black to school in an effort to participate in a funeral I cannot attend for someone who I loved who someone unexpectedly ripped from this earth like the girl sitting next to me rips her algebra homework from her bright pink spiral notebook. I see myself silently screaming to the starry sky begging for answers and wondering why no reply reaches my ears like a violent flash of lightning without the steady booming thunder to follow. I have suffered losses, my relationship with the Lord has stammered, and I have sinned. Though like the girl the silver remains slightly tarnished from these experiences, my chalice underneath still shines through. I would drain every last ounce of my thick scarlet blood to protect my family, and I regularly wrap my time and attention into a pretty little box with a bow on top as a gift to present to those who need them more than I do. Because of these actions and experiences, I am the girl in

Terry Williams, on the other hand, instead of focusing on the numbers of the cancer, she focuses on the descriptions of cancer through her all five senses in seeing her mother’s struggle with cancer. She let us feels, the grim hand of cancer that wraps around her mother’s life. To her, cancer has become a “disease of shame” which encourages people to hide and lies (Williams 93). But, it’s also more than just a disease caused by random mutation, but it was also the rope at which her mother’s life hang on. Perhaps it’s not that she didn’t focus on the statistics and the numbers about cancer, but perhaps it was because the thought of her mother’s suffering alone had her mind occupied. Terry Williams’s poetical tone in explaining about her mother’s fighting with cancer allowed us to understand the effects that cancer had caused to the victim. Cancer, as she believes, doesn’t only affecting her mother’s life but it also affects herself, for “perhaps the umbilical cord between Mother and [her] has never been cut”

This statement is also powerful as it recognizes her will to fight has died off due to what she had to endure: a true fighter until the ultimate and somewhat tragic end. This is a play on words as cancer can both represent the disease that she has and the sign associated with the horoscopes. It ends my poem off nicely and ties up any loose ends that may have occurred due to embedding horoscope personality traits throughout my slam