Crystal Westly by Rachel (year 7 reading list txt) 📕

Crystal Westly was a tall girl with long brunette hair that she cut herself once every three months just to trim the ends. Her family couldn’t afford to take her to a hair dresser. She lived with her mother and father on a two hundred acre Christmas tree farm. Crystal’s mother was pregnant with her second child, but, again because the family was so poor she had never been to a doctor. They had a house wife come once a week and the house wife predicted the baby to be another girl.
Two months before her mother’s due date Crystal began to feel sick. She assumed that she was just getting a cold because winter was coming and the days were beginning to cool down. As she began to feel worse and worse they assumed it was the flu. A month passed before her parents decided that despite the cost Crystal needed to see a doctor.
At age ten, on October 23, 1999 Crystal Westly was diagnosed with leukemia. Sitting in a white hospital room that smelled of sterilizer Crystal and her parents were given the news. Crystal and her father were silent, she was thinking about death and he was thinking about how expensive it was going to be to treat her. But, there was no doubt in his mind, he would work twenty-four seven it meant he could pay for his daughters treatment. Isaiah looked over at is weeping wife Caroline as she sat in the chair.
Not much was said about the cancer for the next few weeks. Crystal started going to treatments three times a week. She cried every morning that she would wake up to see some of her hair on her pillow. She hadn’t told anyone at school except for her best friend, and only after she made her promise not to cry about what she told her. She cried despite her promise. That day when Crystal got home her dad met her at the door and told her that her mother had had her baby. Crystal didn’t have a chance to ask her father what was wrong because it was clear that something was, his face was stressed and etched with worry and sadness. The house wife, Leanne, brought the baby out into the living room. She gave a strained smile,
“I was wrong, you have a new baby brother.” Crystal walked over. My new brother had the biggest, brownest eyes. He had an oval head with slightly pale skin. His dark brown hair matched his eyes perfectly. He was wrapped in a soft blue blanket.
“His name is Brandon.” Her father whispered from behind. It was obvious that something was different with his facial features, there was something odd about them but Crystal couldn’t figure out what. Then she remembered that a boy at her school had similar features.
Brandon had Down Syndrome.
The next day Crystal’s mother left. She packed up her few belongings and walked out leaving only a note for her family to grieve over.
My dear Crystal, Brandon, and Isaiah, do not blame yourselves,
I must go. I cannot take the sadness. Please
Take care of and love Brandon as though I was still there.

Twenty three years later Crystal looks back on her life. She realized that raising her brother and living without a mother made her stronger. She never blamed her mother for leaving. She understood what her mother felt. Her mother thought Crystal would die, though she would never admit it, and she assumed that she would get Brandon taken away. She thought he would be taken to an asylum. The grief was something her mother was unable to handle.
Crystal goes over to Brandon’s daily, but otherwise he lives happily by himself as an accomplished artist. Crystal managed to find love and have a family of her own. Her father moved to New York and became an accomplished business man while her mother came to feel again. With time her mother came back to connect with her daughter, son, and husband who never so much as thought of divorcing her in thirteen years after going without his wife.
Crystal knew that she and her family had suffered, but she also knew that if they hadn’t they wouldn’t be the happy people that they were today. People who know more about love and sadness and strength and than any other person they ever met.

Publication Date: 10-13-2011

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