Room of Thousand Mirrors: First Chapter of my Memoir

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The crash startled the house. I swear at that moment a tractor trailer had blown through the kitchen right into the room where I was standing. My eldest brother Donnie led me and my younger brother up stairs to my parent’s room to a safe spot under their bed. I was ten, and full of fear. We tried to stay calm, but my mothers yelling from the floor below us startled us even more. It was one of those moments where you have no choice but to grow up and be a man. I was waiting for a signal from Donnie, but when I looked at him he didn’t offer me any of the answers I was looking for. What do we do? When is it ok to go downstairs? Is my father going to be alive? Death wasn’t much a part of my life as I remember. I still didn’t understand the point at which someone stops breathing and the time there after. At this point I realized what those few seconds of lifelessness look like when I saw my father. Donnie and I scampered down stairs slowly as if we were trying to hide from something. That’s when I saw my father all 6 foot 2 of him lying on the ground next to the kitchen sink. The impact of his fall had made him bite his tongue and there was blood noticeable around his lip. He had ripped the cabinet door clear off as if grabbing it was the only hope he had to stay on his feet. As my mother screamed at Donnie to call 911 I just stood and stared. I didn’t know whether he was dead, or just taking a very painful nap. Either way I was too scared to move. With all the chaos surrounding the room, one distinguishable noise began to ring on my head. It was the sound of my baby sister crying in her chair in the corner of the room. She seemed terrified with every belting scream she let out of her tiny mouth.

 It wasn’t the image in front of her that terrified her, but the sound of everyone yelling and all of us crying. With all of the madness in the kitchen she still maintained her innocence. She had no idea what was going on, to her loud noises upset her. It didn’t bother her to see her father lying on the ground in front of her. She was pure. I tried to calm her down, but nothing seemed to work. There was just too much going on. I remembered we left my little brother still hiding under the bed upstairs and I ran to see if he was ok. He was curled into such a tiny ball I could barely make him out to be a human being. I assured him everything was going to be ok, and that daddy had just slipped and fell. I realized that my truth at the time would have been no help to making him feel better so I held onto the façade that the situation was under control. I wish I could believe the words that came out of my mouth at that moment. As I made my way downstairs I heard the paramedics pull into the drive way and rush into the house. My father was awake, but still not conscious enough to move. They assured us everything would be ok, and that had a calming effect on the house. The noise began to diminish, and my mother was now trying to gather us all in to give some sort of comfort to what we had just gone through. “Where is Tim, where did he go?” she asked us. No one knew but me, I felt strong for that one second and told her I took care of him and that he is upstairs in her room. I wanted to be strong, and I wanted to know what happened to my father. We were all asking the same questions at that time and no one came up with any answers. As I watched him get lifted onto the stretcher he looked like a lost child. His eyes were wandering as if he was lost trying to find a path that would lead him home.

His body lay limp, and his facial expression didn’t change at all. I wanted him to be ok. He was the strong point of our family; he was super man to me so how could this happen to him? With all these thoughts swirling in my head I looked to my mother for answers. She told us that he passed out, and that his heart skipped a beat. I remembered he was about to take a sip of his coffee when that horrible sound crashed in the room. Maybe it was too hot? I had no idea and neither did my mother.

         Hours later my mother left to pick my dad up at the hospital. He was ok. The doctors could not explain it, they just said it was a freak accident and not to worry. As time carried on in my life I began to realize that all of the wrong in my life began to come to a head. That moment when my father collapsed became un-answered up until the first day of my sophomore year of high school. My mother explained the events that day, as the moment the first cancer cell took its path in my fathers body and began to wreak havoc on our way of life and my fathers well being. To think just one cell gone bad could do so much wrong. The prognosis for my father’s sickness was non Hodgkin mantel cell lymphoma. Is that bad? Sounded like some distant extinct language to me. Turns out it is pretty bad. My father was 1 of 5 other people in the country to have been diagnosed with this strain of lymphoma.