Being Human

Salt to the Sea

[Editor’s note: Ceili Leahy was 17 in the fall of 2014 when she started at the University of Virginia, three months after completing chemotherapy for metastatic Ewings sarcoma. She took a course in American Environmental Literature that first semester, and in November 2014 was assigned to write an essay in the style of one of the authors. Ceili—an Irish name, pronounced Kay-Lee–chose Annie Dillard because she so loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “By using [Annie Dillard’s] technique of posing rhetorical questions and incorporating language that is more colloquial than literary, I created a similar voice,” Ceili wrote in a note accompanying the assignment. “My exploration of the human memory builds off Dillard’s treatment of consciousness and self-consciousness and their pertinence to the ‘great door to the present.’” On January 27, 2016, a year and a half after writing this essay, Ceili, then 19, died from acute myeloid leukemia at Children’s National Hospital. She had stopped treatment a few months earlier so that she could “live vividly” through her last days.]