The Death Of My Brother And I Spent My Last Days

The torment: remembering what you left behind and even worse; the prospect that you may never

The death of a loved one is not something that is easy to live through. For Cheryl Strayed that was no different, but Strayed used it as her driving force at a chance to pursue her dreams as well as an opportunity make her grieving heard. She battle with the death of her mother as well as her whole life being turned upside down as acknowledged in, “I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous” (Strayed 57). One thing that did not change throughout it all was that she still enjoyed literature and her dream to pursue to be a well know writer. Throughout her entire journey of the PCT she continued to read and to expand on her knowledge, not only about the PCT but as well as about herself which is addressed in “Even the Faulkner novel had more right to be in my pack, if only because I hadn’t read it and therefore it could be explained as entertainment. I’d read The Dream of a Common Language so often that I’d practically memorized it” (Strayed 60). Her mother’s passing was her reason for embarking on such an unknown adventure, which in return was her driving force behind putting out her book in order to prove to people that if you are in a dark place in your life it does not always stay that way.

"You just don 't know," she said. "You hide in this little fortress, behind wire and sandbags, and you don 't know what it 's all about. Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country—the dirt, the death—I just want to eat it and have it there inside me. That 's how I feel. It 's like . . . this appetite. I get scared sometimes—lots of times—but it 's not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I 'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it 's like I 'm full of electricity and I 'm glowing in the dark—I 'm on fire almost—I 'm burning away into nothing—but it doesn 't matter because I know exactly who I am. You can 't feel like that anywhere else."” (O’ Brien 80-81). Tim O’ Brien shows how being in contact with the war can change a person so pure and innocent to a person who isn’t in connection with themselves and is forever trapped inside their own mind. Also it shows how the people who can’t handle the rough environment of war can have a terrible reaction and loose themselves. He also shows how the war changes you mentally making it hard for you to tell if the is the real you or just a persona you took when you couldn’t handle it anymore and needed to mask your broken soul.

As I walked, the air of this haunted, dreadful and sorrowful land had sucked the life out of everything and roared as humanity began to disappear. As I carried on walking, I noticed that the small fraction of light was getting smaller and smaller, until it had been engulfed into a think black ash like smoke. Aggressively, the wind walked past the building with its cruddy feeling, blowing away all signs of life. Deeper and deeper into the land was a burning car door. The fire roared and crackled. The roaring and crackling of the burning car door merged with the aggressive air and created the loudest sounds ever heard on land. Growing darker, the skies made me feel nauseous. The fear of not waking up if a human fell asleep towered

I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt Lemon steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, and then he soars into a tree. The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over. (O’Brien 31)

What was once a beautiful but small lawn with grass is now a patch of dead grass with dirt exposing itself under the grass. What was once the creaky barn doors are completely destroyed, with broken glass on the ground on the outside, leading to the inside. What was once the living room where I had spent so much time watching television and playing games with my siblings, now has its carpet completely torn up, walls indented, and closet in complete shambles with light gleaming sharply through the holes of the closet from holes that were made by vandals who never knew the true value of the humble abode that I used to reside in. My old home, since being lived in by me and my family has since been abandoned by the family that we had entrusted the house to previously. Now the house just stays there, an eerie empty shell of what it used to be. A place where I was safe and happy, now a dark and scary place that no one deserves to live in, a place that humans have indeed used well, so well that there is nothing left of what it used to be. That image of the house was the last I saw it, back in 2010, It is possible now that the house had since been destroyed, with the memories that have been carved into the walls, fireplace, windows, closets, and bedrooms, are now nothing more but a blur of destroyed objects that will one day be removed, as people pass by the home that once was will never be able to see its clarity, but instead will only be able to see the blur of colors protruding from the exterior of the house, or perhaps the brown of the barn like doors, or the patches of green still rising from the dead grass that surrounds it, until eventually, it simply disappears completely invisible to the city that used it ever so

We didn’t know what to take with us. Mom and I hurried from room to room, anxiously looking at portraits, furniture, and chandeliers. We knew that we couldn’t take them and feared that we would never see our home or belongings again. We grabbed necessities such as medications, clothes, electronic devices, and family photos.

He woke up sweating and breathing roughly; it has been forty-eight years since the war, but every night, his nightmares take him back to the forest again. He’s scared of closing his eyes, because the darkness allows the images of bloody limbs, empty eye sockets, of death to fill his mind. I’ve never seen my father as helpless as he looks after waking up screaming, and to help ease his suffering, I decided to read the entries of a diary that he kept during and after the war:

“About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the

Stanly sat up so fast he knocked his head into the bunk above him, for the fourth time this week he found himself rubbing his head while his above bunkmate muttered inaudible curses into his pillow. As he wiped away the cold sweat that had started to run down his temples he tried to shake the image of the burning wreck from his head. He had been having nightmares like this almost every night since he had joined the flying corps over a week ago, but tonight had been especially bad which he assumed had something to do with what he had witnessed the day before. He sighed and rolled out of bed. As he stood up he was painfully aware of the empty

Each day, Cosmopolitan updates their website with gossipy celebrity news articles and emotional real-life reads, provided in a chatty, youthful tone. In contrast, ABC publishes transcripts daily that cover current news issues from all over the globe. Every transcript posted utilises structured and formal language, and provides facts and statistics within the story. Both forms of mass-media the Cosmopolitan web article My Brother Took His Own Life, and ABC’s radio transcript, Suicide Leading Cause of Death for Young Australians, address the same issue, youth suicide, in varying ways.

The death of a loved one is one of the most challenging events I have had to overcome. The summer of 2014, I was just going into my junior year, was one for the books. It was an absolutely amazing summer. My sister had her first baby in May and we were getting to make his first summer his best, but little did we know it would also be his last. We lost him at the end of July. It was one of the hardest things to cope with. So many unanswered questions still to this day stand.

Note 2. A cascade of striking old images and memories are stealing my sleep, old-but-new (and fresh) memories increasingly arising from a past I didn’t recognize twenty-something years ago. Most of the old you already have heard of, the ones that, with your help, I left in your office I don’t know how many times. The old-but-new are fresh and painful – the ones I collected throughout the time since I made the decision to follow my husband and move to California, to leave my country, my community and the people dearest to me; the fear, the sadness, the insecurity, the pressure, the guilt and confusion the anxiety all hidden in my artificially fabricated strength. Remembering all this, has taken me to those painful and bittersweet moments in my past that by leaving my native land, my culture, the culture David and I so lovingly created, inevitably, for me, have led to my uprooting from the self I thought I knew. The many losses I never acknowledged… I didn’t know the real meaning of grief.

"There once was a young Prince. No one knew his real name as he was never allowed into the public. Therefore they just called him Blackwing. He grew up alone in his fathers castle. No friends were ever made, and his mother could no longer give birth after, the accident. No one knows much about the accident either, the only wittness was Blackwing and he refused to speak of it no matter what was threatened. A few months passed and his mother and father perished in a fire in the estate. Blackwing assumed the role of King. This arrangement didn 't last long as a short few years later he dissapeared in another estate fire. It was soon believed that he died in the fire and his bones had turned to ashes as they did not find any remains. But eventually strange events started to occur to make people believe that he staged his death and went on to make other children feel the pain of loosing their parents. It was reported by victims that they had heard knocking at their windows the previouse night, then at around midnight they died. Never to be heard from again. It was later called the BlackWing curse, as it only happened to children who were naughty"

I woke up at four a.m., showered, changed, brushed my teeth, combed my hair and drove to work, but that’s when the fundamentals of the world changed. Earth practically quivered with the anticipation of the future for the world. That day, the world was thrown out of balance. The volcano under Yellowstone park exploded forever changing the world as we knew it. The volcano wasn’t expected to erupt for centuries, yet it still exploded. Millions of people died from just the ash alone. Families trapped in buildings and killed as the roof caved in, crushing them to death. Others separated from their other loved ones, unable to contact them and know if they were alive. During that crisis, here I am driving to work, unaware of the calamity