It was the summer of 2008, and I was sitting at Terminal D just watching all the people coming out through the gates. I feel the best place to go watch people and feel the emotion in the air is at the airport. There are all kinds of emotion flying around, the feeling of dropping off your son and his family at the airport not knowing when you will be seeing them next. The feeling of receiving your husband from the airport after a long business trip, also the feeling of losing your luggage at the airport, there is always some kind of emotion there, be it love, anger or wistful. I couldn’t sit anymore, being impatient was always a habit of mine, but in this case it was justified, my parents were coming from Bangladesh. I hadn’t seen them in six months. It was the first time I was going to see them after I left home to come here in America. As, I started to think about all of these I started to feel very unusual. I was neither happy nor sad I just wanted them to be here. Standing in the corner with my arms crossed I looked at the door and there they were after a forty-five minutes wait.
I ran and held both my parents not wanting to let go, I had never felt so vulnerable before in my life. I couldn’t understand why I was not feeling right, something seemed a little bizarre to me. The thought of spending my summer with my family was supposed to make me happy but I was not feeling it. However, I tried holding on to all my emotions and finally managed to drive them home. After a while my father was really tired and miserably jetlagged so he went to bed, but my mother was sitting there. It seemed like she was waiting for my father to leave, so that she could tell us something. This made me nervous; I was scared and had the wildest thoughts in my mind. Ignoring all my thoughts I went near my mother, she held and my hand and asked me sit beside her, finding this a little deviant both my brothers came close to us and sat down. Then the words, “Your father has carcinoma; and...