I view myself as a Kintsugi bowl. Kintsugi is a Japanese art where gold lacquer is used to mend the broken parts of a bowl. The end result is a beautiful bowl that has gold lacquer where the cracks were. My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2009. After going through several rounds of radiation, he was temporarily in remission. During those eleven years he gave me a normal childhood filled with love and affection. In 2018, he relapsed. His numbers were high, so he started going through experimental treatments, one of which caused a stroke leaving him with a condition called aphasia. This happened in February of my sophomore year; he continued to go downhill. While he was in a rehabilitation home, I called him every day and drove there after school. I learned how to love from a distance and learned how to communicate in ways other than speech. After he was released, I kept a close eye on him, but he was still independent. Then he had his second stroke which amplified all of these symptoms. By then it was April of 2023. I was almost out of school and all my attention was on him. I learned patience and empathy; imagine trying to figure out that your dad wants water, but it takes 10 minutes for him to communicate that, leaving him sobbing by the end. It breaks a little part of you. I learned how to balance family, trauma, and school. In October of my junior year, things started to get really bad. After school, I would go straight home to help him, feed him, or drive him to appointments. I learned a lot about caring for the people around you at any cost. Watching my everything wither into nothing was a sight I never thought I would see. Despite being broken, I learned compassion for other people, because their stares and whispers come from a place of unknown struggles. I became a translator for my father and learned his new language, talking to different doctors about his treatment and symptoms. My junior year isn't a memory I like to think about because it ended up being my last full year with my father. It was the last week of June of 2024 and my dad was given 6 months to live. He died about three weeks later, leaving my family shattered. I had learned to be self-dependent because my mom had to become my dad’s full-time caregiver. I learned to cook, clean, and buy necessities for myself, because my mom needed a perfect daughter, not another worry. Losing the carefree part of my childhood made me try to retain some fleeting parts of it, so I tanned, swam, and I became my own person. I read books about summers in Italy and falling in love. Still, my dad died on July 19, 2024. At the time, my favorite book was When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, in which Kalanithi finally realizes, “Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.” Instead the things you go through shape who you are. The things that happened to my dad broke me, but my love for my family became the gold lacquer that shaped me into a new person. In fact, I’ve come to realize that we are all broken in some way, but this time in my life taught me to show others grace and love when they need it most. Even in the hardest times, brokenness can be made beautiful.