Good-Bye free essay sample

â€Å"Come now,† her text read. That was all she needed to say. Within seconds, I was in my moms car. As I drove, I concentrated on keeping my eyes dry, trying not to think about what I was about to do. My muscles were tense, my teeth were clenched, and the closer I got to her house, the faster the blood pumped through my body. Confusion and terror took over my thoughts, making my attention to the road unreliable. I had never had to use so much willpower to focus on my driving. Once her house finally appeared, I ripped the keys from the ignition. As I ran to her front door, I wondered if I should be sprinting toward this daunting event, but my trembling hands were already turning the doorknob. â€Å"Hes dying,† she told me a couple of weeks before. I dont remember hearing anything after that. We will write a custom essay sample on Good-Bye or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Maybe it was because her sobs made her words inaudible, or maybe I had stopped listening, but either way, I had not believed her. Being best friends with a straightforward girl whose father was battling cancer gave me many speechless moments. This was one of them. I held the phone to my ear as I listened to her cry painfully. Finally, I managed to whisper, â€Å"No †¦Ã¢â‚¬  I wanted to say, â€Å"Thats not true,† or â€Å"Itll all get better soon,† but how did I know that? Each time I promised her that he would get better, my words were contradicted by his doctors. The hospital visits were ending with more depressing news, but I still had not believed her. I wasnt willing to accept that things like this happened to people I knew. Now here I was, standing in her laundry room. She hugged me and whispered, â€Å"Be strong.† Then she pointed to her parents bedroom. Entering the room, my emotions escaped from me as if I had taken too big a breath and let it loose. Insuppressible sobs shook my body as I reached for his hand. But this wasnt the man I knew – the coach who taught me to play soccer in elementary school, the silly guy who sang along to â€Å"Crazy Frog† during our middle school obsession, or even the man who became my second father during a trip to Australia just six months earlier. I was holding the hand of cancer. Pimples peppered his yellowed face, and his skin was loose from the weight he had lost. How do you say good-bye to someone who knows hes dying? I didnt want my last moments with him to be heavy-hearted. Fighting my irregular breathing, I began to list all the happy times we had shared. I thanked him for the vacations I went on, and for the compassionate, strong, beautiful daughter he had raised. When I finished, I said, â€Å"I will miss you. I love you.† I was no longer shaking as I gave his hand a gentle squeeze. That day shaped the way I live. I realized that no one is invincible. It was a terrifying awakening, and initially I lived in a world of â€Å"what ifs† – making fear a routine feeling. In time, I came to a different conclusion: I need to appreciate life; I cannot allow myself to take it for granted, because I dont know when my life and the lives around me will come to an end. My continued decision to be chemical-free comes from my realization that I am lucky to have a body that sustains me. I have learned to forgive easily. Weve all heard the phrase, â€Å"Our time is precious; we shouldnt waste it,† but it wasnt until I held deaths hand that I learned to live that way.

Good-paying Jobs

Good-paying Jobs Good-paying Jobs Good-paying Jobs By Maeve Maddox A reader questions the expression â€Å"good-paying jobs†: I’ve just come across ‘good-paying jobs’ in a report I’m editing by a highly regarded organization. (It has also been used by some politicians lately.) I was wondering if you could address the use of this phrase instead of what I would expect – â€Å"well-paying jobs.† I believe it’s not correct. The OED tells us that good is â€Å"the most general and most frequently used adjective of commendation in English, and one of the most common non-possessive adjectives in all periods from Old English to the present day.† Consider only a few of the uses of good: good food (wholesome) good books (well-written with worthwhile content0 good money (not counterfeit) good soil (fertile) good English (grammatically correct, well enunciated, and pronounced according to current national conventions) A good question is thought-provoking, a good friend is loyal and dependable. Captain Ahab hopes for a good wind and Yenta looks for a good match for a client. Someone, if not Chief Crazy Horse, may have said â€Å"It’s a good day to die,† and some scriptwriter came up with an episode of Desperate Housewives called â€Å"What’s the Good of Being Good?† The OED entry for good identifies the word as adjective, noun, adverb, and interjection. The good page of the online edition I use scrolls seemingly into infinity. My Compact Edition of the OED shows fifteen columns for plain good and another fifteen columns for words that have good as the root. We speak of good-tasting food (food that tastes good), good-looking people (people who look good), and good-meaning do-gooders (people who mean well). Note: American speakers are more likely to say â€Å"a well-meaning person,† but the OED includes â€Å"good-meaning.† Why shouldn’t we speak of â€Å"good-paying jobs† to mean â€Å"jobs that pay well†? The OED includes good-paying in its list of hyphenated â€Å"good words† for special uses, although the earliest citation (1834) doesn’t use the hyphen: Sandy, this has surely been a good paying job; for, when you were in the Calton, your little ones could not come out for dirt and rags. A Google search indicates that the two phrases are in about equal use. The Ngram Viewer shows both forms, with â€Å"good paying† higher on the graph than â€Å"well paying.† â€Å"This job pays good† is undeniably nonstandard usage. On the other hand, the following usage in an obituary written by Steven Greenhouse and published in The New York Times does not ignite my grammar nerve: From 2000 to 2002, Mr. Herman headed the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Working for America Institute, which promoted labor-management partnerships to create profitable businesses and good-paying jobs. I think that speakers who prefer â€Å"well-paying jobs† to â€Å"good-paying jobs† should use it, but unless house style demands one or the other, a writer’s choice should probably stand. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Grammar category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Avoid Beginning a Sentence with â€Å"With†15 Words for Household Rooms, and Their SynonymsTestimony vs. Testimonial