Essay Questions

How does Grealy’s illness impact her education?

Grealy elucidates, “HAVING MISSED MOST of fourth grade and all but a week or so of fifth grade, I finally started to reappear at school sometime in sixth grade during my periodic “vacations” from chemotherapy. I’d mysteriously show up for a week or two weeks or sometimes even three or four, then disappear again for a couple of months.” Grealy’s cancer which requires extensive treatments hinders her from attending school consistently like her healthy peers. The time which she would have been in school is diverted to the chemotherapy sessions which require extensive durations. Accordingly, cancer impacts Grealy’s academic life negatively.

What is the implication of “Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”?

Grealy notes, “WHEN SCHOOL STARTED again, my ninth-grade English class began reading poetry. Our first assignment was Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.”…my teacher wanted us to talk about whether or not the boy loved his father. As we spent the forty minutes debating along those lines, what I knew about my love for my own father seemed to grow more distant and closed off.” The poem is pertinent because it elicits Grealy’s reflections about her connection with her father. The debate in Grealy’s classroom is based on assertions in the poem which allude to the narrator loving his father and those which suggest that he detests the father. Grealy’s ability to relate the message in the poem to her life indicates that she is conscious that her affection for her father is not sturdy.

Deconstruct Grealy’s conclusions regarding truth.

Grealy concludes, “I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever…most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else, only to leave our original faces behind to turn into ghosts that will inevitably resent and haunts.” Grealy recognizes that truth is variable; hence, it can be forgotten at times. Society contributes to the variability of truth by encouraging people to don façades. Eventually, the disguises which are intended to conceal realities and truths turn out to be troublesome. Accordingly, truth is not everlasting.