Writing a College Essay About What I Was Thinking After I Heard the News

Writing a College Essay About What I Was Thinking After I Heard the NewsAfter I found out that my cousin's son had been killed in Iraq, it made me think about writing a college essay about the time I was there when I heard the news. What I found was that I was still trying to process the death. If I had been in high school, I could have written an essay about it, but in college, I was trying to move on and start a new chapter in my life.My husband's older brother was in the U.S. military service in the first Gulf War. He was stationed in Kuwait and met my cousin who was from Nigeria. We used to go to the mosque in our neighborhood where my cousin took me in after she was married. This was not an easy thing for me to do as a young girl because I was born in Lagos, Nigeria, a city in the northern part of the country and I was brought up to believe that it was a non-Muslim place.They didn't have Islamic prayers during the war in the Gulf War, so my cousin prayed in her hijab because she knew I was Muslim. I was not told until a few years later that my cousin was a Muslim and I wasn't allowed to call her my cousin. This has always bothered me, since I have spent most of my life feeling that I am part of the world.I knew that I did not want to think of this every day but I could not help it. I could feel how it was affecting me and it's because I could not get out of my mind the thought of someone being killed and they were Muslim.It was hard to even be around this man I barely knew. He used to call us by the wrong names and call me 'sister'. He told me he loved me for the first time but I just couldn't believe it. He had been in a war and I just wasn't ready to have a relationship with him because he used to say bad things about my country.He still insisted on calling me 'sister' and never asked me to change my name. One day, when we were both sitting at the bar, I felt the need to tell him that I was Muslim. To this day, I still feel shocked every time I think abo ut what he said to me.His reaction was so bad that I was afraid that he was going to hurt me. I was afraid of having his anger turn on me so I didn't talk to him for a while. I always hid away when I heard that my cousin was dead in Iraq or any other war zone.It was very difficult for me to actually write a college essay about this time in my life because I was still trying to process the death of my cousin and it was more than just a day. I was so worried about what was happening and it was still fresh in my mind.