I got an A- (A minus) for my first essay ever in the United States. I think it's not so bad, considering this is the first essay I ever written in English in my whole life..
Before I turned in the essay, I've re-read it like 15 times (at least) to make sure I got all the grammar good. But no international student's essay is perfect (quoting from my English Professor). Her statement is so true. When she gave my essay back, graded, she made a few notes of the mistakes on the essay. Some are about tenses, run on, and missing words. When I read it again, suddenly everything seems so clear. Why didn't I notice all those mistakes before I turned it in?!
The essay is a narrative essay. It's not a true story, but I did wrote it based on some of my memories about my aunt. I also added a little spices here and there, just to make the essay more attractive. Oh, and for your information, my English professor wrote a little comment on the top of my essay. She wrote: "Well written. Sad."
It is a sad story actually.. (and it is well written too ^o^)
Here is my A-minus-graded-essay. Go ahead and read it. See if you enjoy this sad story, or maybe you can notice some of the grammatical mistakes I've made.
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I had an aunt. She was the only sister of my mother, and she was a very loving person in our big family. My mother and my aunt were very similar. They were as close as two sisters can be. I suppose that is one reason why I always loved her like my own mother, she was almost like a second mother to me. When I was fifteen years old, she got really sick of a cancer, and that was the saddest experience I and the rest of my family had. We suffered through her illness.
She lived in Bandung, a four hour drive from my hometown, Jakarta. The medical facilities in Bandung was not really the best for her, and of course, we wanted her to have the best medication treatment she needed, so almost every week she came to Jakarta and we arranged doctor’s appointments for her at the best hospital we could find in Jakarta. She would stay at our place, and we would still have a wonderful time together even through her sickness. All of us would sit together at dinner time and just talk about everything, laughing and enjoying those precious moments together. As I was sitting there, laughing so hard at those funny childhood stories she and my mom was telling me about, I said to myself, “My aunt is going to be alright, I just know it.” But I was wrong.
Every week she looked paler and paler, as if all her blood was vanishing through the air. Well, her illness was an ovary cancer, so losing blood was one of her primary health problems. She was constantly bleeding heavily. A few months later, she looked weaker and seemed more in pain than ever. She even had problems going down the stairs at our house; it was too much for her.
I myself had a heavy bleeding problem a few months ago. It resulted iron deficiency and anemia. I was very weak and exhausted almost all the time. Those days really reminded me of my beloved late aunt. I can only imagine how much weaker she was and how much more pain she had to handled. As I thought of her, tears were falling down my face.
We did all we could to help her. We really took care of her and made sure she had all the medication needed. But when we heard from the doctor that her cancer is apparently in stage IV, a stage where the cancer has spread to distant parts of the body, we were devastated. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I sat for hours in my bed in the dark, just thinking of her and what would happen to her. And as I sat there in silence, I vaguely heard my mother cried from her room.
To my surprise, my aunt kept her optimistic attitude. She was very brave in facing her illness, braver than any of us were. She never told me that she was not afraid to die, but I can see it in her eyes and in her attitude toward life. Despite the illness getting worse, she never missed even one of our weekly meetings at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Her faith in the hope of resurrection explained in the Bible was one of the main things that made her strong spiritually, and her faith kept me strong as well in facing her illness.
Not long after that, the very last thing I ever wanted to happen happened. Sometime after midnight, we received a phone call from Bandung. My mother answered it, and after a short moment she turned pale and suddenly burst into tears. I knew then, my aunt had just passed away.
We packed our bags as fast as we could, held our tears in as much as we could, and drove right away to Bandung. Everybody in the car just sat there in silence through the whole four hour drive, not wanting to cry but unable to get rid of the sadness either.
That day was the saddest day in my life and the longest funeral I ever endured. Almost all my relatives were there, feeling the same sorrow I was. My aunt’s children was mourning the most; there was so much grief in their eyes. I am sure that I would feel the same thing if I were them. I can’t even imagine how I would feel if my own mother died. I remember one of her daughters flew from Sumatra that day. She came to the funeral straight from the airport. She had not seen her mother for almost a year, and there her mother was, lying in a coffin. That day, her other daughter didn’t eat or sleep since my aunt passed away, and neither did my mother.
My aunt was put in a black wooden coffin, wearing a white flowery dress with a small bouquet on her hands. She looked very tired, tired of struggling to live. Even though I felt crushed to see her in a coffin, I know with all my heart that I have the chance to see her again one day in the paradise on earth, as this is what God has promised us in the Bible at John 5:28,29.
Now it is no longer her struggle to live, it is mine. It is my struggle to live in this wicked system of world. Her strong faith in the Bible and her persistence as one of Jehovah’s witnesses has always strengthened me through difficult times in my life. Right now, whatever I am doing, I am determined to work at it whole-souled as to Jehovah God, and I am looking forward to seeing my aunt again.
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I miss you all!