I believe that loss gives us experience, and I also believe that experience gives us wisdom. I've been told I’m above my years, that I’m wise for a teenager. Recently a group of peers informed me that when I walk into a room, they all get along, whether or not some of them had been arguing beforehand. I've always been one for peace and I've always understood that peace comes from accepting, which comes from understanding, which brings us back to my first sentence. Experience. Experiences play a major role in the everyday lives of people. If you make a mistake, you learn from it and, most of the time, won’t do it again. Though, sometimes experiences are inevitable like, for instance, loss. Loss, no matter how minor, has an impact on people. Loss is an experience that teaches people how to persevere through hardships and helps them become wiser.

Ten years ago, my father passed away from a heart attack. The ambulance had come and I remember holding my mother’s hand and telling her that everything would be okay. Little did I know that I had lost a major part of my childhood, that I would grow up not knowing what it was like to have a father, which is something I still do not know to this day. At five years old, I understood that something was sad, but not why. All I knew was that something had happened to daddy and he won’t be coming back. My mother is a strong woman and stayed that way throughout this entire ordeal, which makes me extremely proud of her. Raising two young children, ages 5 and 1, is hard enough, but doing it by yourself in a foreign country while your entire family is overseas is something I would never be able to do. Under all of that stress, which gave her terrible migraines, she remained resilient and she continues to inspire me everyday. My mother tried her best to act as both parents for me and my sister. She taught me to pursue my aspirations and even how to defend myself. She taught me how to be tough, honest, sympathetic, understanding, and observational. However, this is not about how amazing my mother is, if it were, then we’d be here forever.

The death of such an important figure in anyone’s life can be cataclysmic, but losing an important figure at a young age is something different. All loss is terrible, and while I wish it never happened, I know it’s inevitable. I remember, as a child, when someone would tell me to make a wish, whether it was during a birthday, fallen eyelash, or “shooting star”, I would always wish for the same thing. World peace, or to be able to meet my father. You see, that’s the thing, I never wished for my father back, I always wished to meet him or know what he was like. I try not to talk about his death too much because ten years later I still get emotional, and I still wish that I could just talk to him. I was once told by a peer, who had also lost a parent, that because I lost my father at such a young age, I could never be as upset about the death of my father as they had been of theirs. That was what I had grown up thinking; that since I didn't remember my father, I didn't have a real reason to be upset. Once that person had outright told me that, however, I realized that what they didn't understand was that losing someone at a young age doesn't allow you the memories that you would get otherwise; it leaves a void. A void that cannot be filled with anything else. The memories, good or bad, aren't there to act as a reminder of the person, and at times that’s a good thing, as memories can sometimes be the salt that gets rubbed into the wound. Other times, however, it’s worse, because it leaves you with ‘what if’s’, and ‘what if’s’ cause a whole different type of agony.

Looking back on this loss I can see how it’s made me become more understanding and empathetic. I can relate to people’s losses and feelings of sadness. It forced me to mature at a young age and taught me to not live in the past and to not take things or people for granted. I am the person that my friends ask for advice and I never knew why until I looked back and realized that it was because of my ability to relate, which I have gained through my experiences. When you lose someone, you lose a part of yourself as well, the tricky part is moving forward. It’s taken ten years, but I've learned that we eventually move on. Moving on doesn't mean that we forget the person, or that the pain goes away completely, because it never really will. It means that we should learn to cherish the time we had with those people, or appreciate the things they did for us that we were too young or unable to understand the importance of at the time.