My Father Changed My Life

My dad died unexpectedly from cardiac arrhythmia when I was 14 years old. This phrase has become my “go-to line” when people ask what happened. For them, it gives them all the information they need. However, it holds a different meaning for me, it holds how I felt when he died. Losing my father at such a young age changed quite a few social aspects of myself. A few common themes that emerged included the feeling of vulnerability, the feeling of having to grow up faster than everyone else, and an awareness of mortality. Overall, I found out that my life was going to be forever changed.
When my dad died, I felt as if the world needed a pause button. There were so many emotions escaping my brain day to day that I needed time to breathe. That’s when I realized, the world isn’t going to stop because others don’t share the same awareness that I have. For a while, I isolated myself from the world because I believed nobody else understood. This feeling of vulnerability hit me so suddenly after he passed partly because I felt like I didn’t have anyone to protect me anymore. I always knew that I could count …show more content…
Americans live in a culture that prefer to deny and avoid the concept of death. However, in my situation, I lost the notion that life will go on forever and I will die someday as well. This realization can happen at any moment, but it becomes more evident when you lose someone close to you. When I lost my dad I felt like I lost a part of myself as well. The main reason for that is I related so closely to my dad and saw a great deal of him in myself. Sometimes people question why others are so afraid of death. That’s because it’s something that’s out of one’s control. Society operates in the sense that we as humans are in charge of our own destiny. In more or less cases, this is accurate. However, when it comes to death, this isn’t logical. When dealing with death, there is no promise of a