10 Things you should know about being a child growing up with a dying parent:

1. When you and your classmates are first learning how to read a dictionary, there will always be one word they don’t know: privacy. When they ask you where it is, you’ll be able to tell them that it’s the 29th word on the 925th page of a Merriam Webster dictionary published in the year 2001. But when you’ve given them all they asked, their favorite word will still be “public.”

2. The day you learn how to use the hospital equipment is the day you are no longer a child

3. You are born an adult. You come out of the womb with the intellect and physical ability to care for your family because that is what they need. You are a peasant child in the middle ages: work begins the day you are born and your job won’t stop till you are buried with her.

4. When you come back to school, people will develop a favorite phrase. It will be a 1 2 punch along with the word public: “How are you?” Tell them you’re ok. Tell them you are happy and glad you are back. Don’t tell them what you want to. That you are diagnosed with a sunken chest a hole over your heart. Don’t tell them you wish cocaine was more available because hell: at least if your face is numb maybe you won’t cry as much.

5. Not everything needs a retaliation. See there was one time a kid walked up to me and asked if I was ok; I said go away; he said “You don’t get to be mad just because she’s dead.”

6. Anger. . .becomes tight fit clothing you never take off. You are a man created by the affectionate pages of Chinua Achebe: You “never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger” the problem is when you are only agry, Things always fall apart

7.  When they ask you if you are handling her death well, and you want to scream no blasting out the last breath you’ve held since she breathed her last! Don’t do anything but ask them if...

8. They ever knew her full name

9. As you walk through the halls of a high school building, be the dog that smells ignorance. When you hear those children tell you every part of their lives they struggle with, all the homework they have, the B’s they might get, the hangovers they get from drinking away their immaturity, tell them what it means to clash with your own mental composure. Tell them that. . .

10. You have been doing homework over a dying body for the better half of your life. Homework was the rock you leaned on because it was the only deadline you knew, Chemotherapy was the foundation of chemical equations, blood pressure was the only fractions you saw, your English vocab was the list of pain medications---

Life was a class on defusing bombs. . .and a flatline didn’t mean defused; but at least the end was written in stone