“I love you” three words everyone loves to hear, three words that can be understated, said too much or never enough. In high school I retained my knowledge through advanced education, played the hard worker in sports and became a leader through many extracurricular activities. In high school I was given the best free education that was offered but I never once learned how to deal with the last time I would ever hear, “I love you”. From the hero I loved the most, my father. Before my sixteenth birthday I had the world at my hands and hard times didn’t exist at least not that I had seen. I did my best with what I was given and never feared to let my parents down it wasn’t an option. Failure did not exist in my house when I was growing up and I’ve always been taught to take everything as a blessing. My greatest concern was, when were my parents going to let me drive my new car and how i'd spend my next pay check. I was sixteen young, free and ready to drive. It was the summer of 2010 and I had no worries other than dealing with the three demons I called my brothers. My father had been in and out of the hospital throughout the summer for what we thought was a spider bite nothing serious or fatal. It was July 4th and I would be spending my night free of brothers and full of friends. A night filled with laughter had turned into what I would later realize the beginning of an end for someone I had loved more than life itself. August 2011, two weeks before my junior year in high school had started I heard, “I love you” from my father for the last time. I had received a phone call from my mother words that will forever linger in my head, "you're father stopped breathing on his own you need to get to the hospital." I didn't understand I had just said goodbye to him hours before, what had gone wrong? I kept asking myself. I can still remember every second, lying on the hospital cold hard tile floor praying for a different outcome hoping and believing they had the wrong man. The only thoughts going through my head were, "Oh God please don't take him not now not him." It was something hard to swallow. It was the second night of sleeping in the hospital after my father suffered two heart attacks the doctor came out and told us to say our last goodbyes. My heart hit the ground I held onto the wall motionless the world had stopped. I couldn’t catch a grasp on what could have possibly happened for a perfectly healthy man at the age of forty to pass away. At the age of sixteen I couldn’t believe my hero could leave this world without me. Two weeks before school started and I couldn’t help but feel numb. I can honestly say the hardest lesson I’ve learned was having to say goodbye to the one person who understood and knew me better than I knew myself. Losing my father at a young age I didn’t know what to do. I stopped, I lost, I gave up, and I shut down and had too much to believe in crying. Living in a house of five, being the oldest and in high school I had a hard time just trying to catch my breath. I didn’t focus in school and couldn’t my only concern was the ones I had left to rely on. The family I had left at home the three boys who I