Hero

People always ask me why I wanna be a psychologist when I'm older, why I try so hard to help others fit in while not really caring if I do.

It's because Josh died. I watched him linger in pain for months before he passed away, and I was helpless to do anything except pray and hope God was hearing every word I was saying. I wasn't a doctor. I couldn't give him transfusions, medicines, couldn't dull the pain of countless surgeries, couldn't advise him on his choices.

But I could pray. I could ask God to help him through the pain if not save him. I guess God had other plans, because on the 29th of May 2010, he left this world and joined God in another. Or I hope he did.

So this is my answer - I want to be a psychologist because I want to save lives instead of watching them pass. I'm not smart enough to be a doctor. But I know how to help people. I put all my heart and soul into helping people. I can't bear to see people in pain. It infuriates me, because I know someone is the cause of it... and every human on this planet has rights, and one of those rights is to be happy.

Think about it. When you bully someone, you're taking away their right to feel safe and happy. Josh was bullied every year of his life before his cancer for being overweight. And suddenly, he got cancer, and suddenly, everyone was his best friend. Looking for some attention. Seeking some glory. Or maybe just wracked with guilt.

Don't do anything you're not going to be able to live with when you wake up the next day. And don't say something cruel and brush it off as a joke. Because that "joke"? To someone out there, it's an insult, and it hurts. Nobody in my school can honestly say they've never called another student fat, whether they weighed a hundred pounds or three hundred.

So when someone insults you, don't insult them back. It makes you just as low as they are. Just keep your head up. My friends place too much weight on what the so-called "populars" think (you know the clique - the girls that are always stoned, drunk or otherwise intoxicated) that they don't actually bother asking the opinions of their FRIENDS. Too busy trying to impress people who don't actually have the brain cells left to notice anything outside their next drug binge.

Why are these kids seen as "cool"? It's not cool. In a few years when I've graduated university and I'm saving lives and doing something constructive with my time, they'll still be here, in this judgmental hole of a town and still getting drunk and cursing the world and anyone who'll listen for letting them down.

THOSE PEOPLE LET THEMSELVES DOWN.

But if they came to me asking for help, would I do it? Yeah, I would. Because people who can recognise the fact they need it generally are the ones who want to get better. And the right to seek help at any point in life is another basic human right that so many are denied.

Bullying can drive people to suicide. Lives taken far too soon. Can you imagine what it would be like, being so scared, depressed, and alone all the time that you would literally rather die than go on, face your tormentors another five seconds? The pain, the guilt, you experience, knowing what you're doing to your family, helpless to stop feeling what you are?

What if it were you? Wouldn't you want someone to step in and save you? Doesn't anybody want to save a life?

[No one talks to him about how he lives
He thinks that the choices he makes are just his
Doesn't know he's a leader with the way he behaves
And others will follow the choices he's made
He lives on the edge, he's old enough to decide
His brother who wants to be him is just nine
He can do what he wants, because it's his right
But choices he makes change a nine year old's life
Heroes are made when you make a choice

You could be a hero
Heroes do what's right
You could be a hero
You might save a life
You could be a hero
You could join the fight
For what's right, for what's right, for what's right

Little Mikey D was the one in class
Who every day got brutally harassed
This went on for years
Until he decided that never again would he shed another tear
So he walked through the door
Grabbed the 44 off his father's dresser drawer
And said "I can't take life no more"
And like that, a life can be lost.
But this ain't even about that!
All of us just sat back and watched it happen!
Thinking it's not my responsibility to solve a problem that isn't about me
THIS IS OUR PROBLEM!
This is just one of the daily scenarios
In which we choose to close our eyes
Instead of doing the right thing
If we make a choice we can be the voice
For those who won't stick up for themselves!
How many lives could be saved, changed, and rearranged?
Now it's our time to pick a side!
So don't just keep walking by
Don't wanna intervene
Cause you just wanna exist and never be seen
So let's wake up
Change the world
OUR TIME IS NOW!]

-a solitary blue

Eight Months

It's been eight months since Joshua Paul Herrick lost his life to osteosarcoma (bone cancer). He battled it for four years. He barely reached eighteen. This time last year, Josh was told by doctors that he should start organising his things, and that he probably wouldn't be here halfway through next year.

I still don't really understand it. I don't understand why he had to die and why I got to live. I don't understand why a teenager, a kid, was taken from us when there are people who rape and murder and steal and yet nothing bad ever happens to them.

For a really long time I searched for a reason behind his death. Then my nan said something that made me realise a lot of things. She told me that while the Devil made Josh sick, it was God who made him an angel.

After that I found peace with myself, with everyone. I don't know everything. I don't know a lot of things, I can't control everything and I certainly can't explain everything. Thinking you know everything is, to be honest, kind of stupid. Think about the world, how big it is, how much our creator put into it. Consider all the millenia of history. Consider God and His handiwork. There is no possible way to know everything.

"Consider God's handiwork; who can straighten what He hath made crooked?" - Ecclesiastes 7:13.

I can't believe that God gave Josh cancer. We're His children and He loves us even when we're unable to love ourselves or each other. He shows us the way, lights up our world even when all hope seems lost and shows us that His power and His love is greater than any man, woman or child on this planet.

Everything we are and everything we will be is defined by this very moment in which we live and breathe and hope, and each moment is given to us by the grace of God. Each moment we spend laughing in the sun is because He wished it that way. God wants us to be happy, I think.

So even though this Christmas I had one less gift to buy for my friends... I know Josh is there, and waiting for me. I know that one day I'll see him again, even if it's only fleetingly, as if in the rear view mirror. It's alright to mourn. I mourned for Josh long before he died because I knew it was coming but at that point in time, God hadn't yet entered my life.

Or maybe I just never realised he was there.

So I've decided. I'm going to love life. I'm not going to say that it'll be easy, or that I'll always be happy, because we all have rough days and God knows that. But I'm going to try. So, in the words of our idol, Miss Gloria Gaynor, I will survive!

-a solitary blue.

Not again.

"There wasn't a day went by over the past four years that Merbein's Page McCarthy-Beard wasn't in pain because of the cancer that was slowly taking over her body.

The lively, friendly and lovely teen was in and out of hospitals, underwent hundreds of tests in Mildura, Adelaide and Melbourne, including chemotherapy, lost her beautiful long hair, and then a leg.

But there wasn't a day go by that this bubbly girl didn't have a smile on her face, or a thank you to family, friends and hospital staff for all the help she was getting. She was a fighter, determined to fulfill her dream of one day becoming a journalist.

Sadly, just a few months after her 18th birthday, Paige this week lost the fight. She passed away at the Mary Potter hospice in Adelaide at 10pm Tuesday, with family members who had shared the highs and lows of her young life by her side."

-Mildura Weekly 2/7/10, Alan Erskine

I can only really say one thing - not again. Merbein is a half-hour drive from where I live. First was Josh (who the community has mostly seemed to have forgotten about, or maybe it's just too painful), suffering from aggressive, malignant osteosarcoma of his thigh bone, and next is poor Paige, who suffered from an extremely aggressive nerve-ending cancer.

[Take a breath
I pull myself together
Just another step
Until I reach the door]

I don't understand at all. Why is it the kids? Isn't it hard enough that our uncles and aunts and grandparents and parents suffer from this (and we partially expect it because cancer is associated with the elderly), but then they rob us of our friends and siblings too? Who's they? Angels? Demons? Our own malignant cancer cells?

I want to believe. But I can't understand what a child has done that's so wrong it's punishable by death in anybody's eyes. I want to know who's responsible and at the same time I know it's nobody. Nobody can be blamed for her death. You can't blame the doctors, they did their best. You can't blame her body, it malfunctioned. You can't blame her parents, they sacrificed it all for her treatment. You can't blame the community, they rallied around her like a force field.

[And you'll never know the way
It tears me up inside to see you
Sometimes I wish I could save you
And there's so many things I want you to know]

God, if you're there, please tell them we miss them.

the milk bottle. (: