LESS IS MORE An Education

Her father dying on the living room floor broke her heart, but did not shock her. Her mother wielding a knife while screaming and darting around the apartment was frustrating, but not extraordinary. Child Protective Services showing up at Lake Highlands Junior High after learning that she and her sister had been home alone more than a week was scary, but inevitable.

That cancer took both of her parents’ lives is devastating but, ultimately, galvanizing.

Everyone has a story, everyone has pain, says Semien Hagos, and she takes a Nietzschean approach to hers — “to overcome it, embrace it.”

“I don’t regret the life I’ve lived or wish things would have gone differently,” she says. “My life required that I grow up fast or wallow in sadness. It’s strengthened me.”

Semien is the type with whom one might sit and chat for hours. She enjoys a kaleidoscope of pals plucked from an array of social cliques, teams and organizations.

Her voice and easy laughter are a soothing cascade — her beaming smile almost always present, even just after she confides one of innumerable adversities.

The father she knew was gregarious and playful, even when working hard, she recalls.

“He would let me sit in his lap while he was on business calls, always smiling at me,” she remembers. But his hands were wracked by tremors. He was nervous in public situations. Shortly before her birth, a mugger had pummeled him, inflicting permanent nerve and neurological damage.

Only after his death did she learn of her father’s elite status in Ethiopian politics and church, that he was a brilliant academic who absconded during his education in Russia, that he spoke half a dozen languages. She didn’t know that his and her mother’s was an arranged marriage or that Mom was more than 30 years Dad’s junior.

“He was 80 years old when he died. I just assumed he was about the same age as my mom. He just seemed it.”

When she found him on the floor that day, he begged her not to call the ambulance because, they both knew, once she did he would never return home.

That same year, Semien’s mother was los-

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Proceeds will go towards ‘Light Up Lake Highlands’ an effort to bring holiday lights and décor to LH during the 2015 Holiday Season. Learn more about the LH Junior Women’s League at www.LHJWL.org

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