This I Believe
The warm sunny morning of August 13 began like many other days had in my short time in summer vacation. It was about ten o’clock and I had just crawled out of bed and was stuffing some cereal down my throat when the phone rang. My mom answered the phone and the tone of her voice quickly turned from carefree to shock like it always did when she received bad news. She called us, my brother, my father and I, into the room. Then she sat us down at the kitchen table a paused. That quick pause made all of these crazy thought fly into my mind like is my mother sick or did something happen to grandma. Finally, when nobody could take the suspense anymore she whispered in a quite voice, “It’s your Uncle John. He’s … he’s dead.” The room went into complete shock. Nobody said anything. My uncle was only 38. He had been diagnosed with cancer jus t about a month ago. Everyone could see he was getting weaker and wouldn’t last much longer, yet it was still a shock that he had died. I wasn’t very close to him and had only got to meet him a few times because he had moved to Detroit while I was still very young. The funeral was scheduled to happen in a few weeks in Detroit where his immediate family still lived. Since my brother and I had no school because we had summer vacation, my mother informed us that we would travel and attend the funeral with her.
The day of the funeral my mom my mom was seemed depressed didn’t say much. She had been most affected by her brother death because he was just a few years older than her. We had arrived that morning before and were staying in a hotel.
As we pulled up in the parking lot of the church where the funeral was taking place, I saw the people dressed in a sea o f black and a few people weeping. The whole trip seemed like a waste of time to me at that moment since I never even remembered meeting the man. But as we slugged into the church, I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for my uncle John and all the family and friends close to him like my mom.
I can’t remember most of the funeral service, however, I do remember when the people started slithering up and saying things about him like how he took such great care of his family or how kind he was. Everyone was whimpering about how great of a man he was and how he died too early. But the one thing that has stuck to me the most since I first heard was when his mom, my grandmother, came up and cried about all the big dreams he had had while he was a kid that he was planning to accomplish before he got sick. “Johnny always had the biggest dreams. He always told me about how he would make this big business or how he would travel around world.” I thought about how he must have felt lying in the hospital bed knowing that he would never accomplish so many of his hopes and dreams. The things he probably claimed that he would try next month or next year would never be accomplished. Then I thought of all of the things I always put off to do later and how there is no guarantee that this wouldn’t be my last day.
On the long car ride home I had a lot of time to ponder about what I really want to do in life. And that I have to live for the moment because it could truly be your last. You should never finish anything with any regrets knowing that you didn’t do all you can. I believe life is too short too put off things until tomorrow. I believe that you should live life and do all the things you want because when you die, you can’t turn back the clock and do something else. It will have already been too late.