Marissa Laven Biography
5/3/10 8-9 ACE
Karen Laven was surprised to learn that she was once again pregnant with her second child. This was highly unexpected and a second miracle for Bill and Karen. A year before they had their first child Amanda, who was also unexpected. Karen’s doctor told her many times before that she couldn’t have children because of her poor health. So when she found out she was pregnant again in June 1992, she started to pick out names for the new baby. When she went for her sonogram, she didn’t want to know the sex of the baby but her husband did. Bill had found out that the baby was to be another girl and he kept this secret until she was born. Meanwhile, Karen started to think the baby was a boy and looked for boy names. On March 5th 1993 Marissa Laven was born. It was her father that had named her. Bill was the one to name her because Karen had named Amanda. He was also afraid that Karen would name her after a soap opera star, just like she did with Amanda. He had spent a lot of time looking for a name that would mean something. He named her Marissa because it means of the sea, and she is a Pisces. During the first five years of her life, she had gone to Disney land when she was one. She then got her first pet which was a cat named Mittens, and then she got her first dog named Amy. When she was three, both of her grandfathers had died. Marissa would always wish that she had the chance to get to know them before they died. She then began first grade, and on open house day, just before she was to go to school with her father, her dog Amy had bitten her. Marissa was out side playing with Amy, when Amy started to lick Marissa’s ear, she accidentally poked a hole in her ear with her tooth. She
then had to go with her father to the emergency room and waited there for over four hours. The next three years are a blur and unimportant. In third grade Marissa began having some medical issues but also made a great friend in the same year. In her third grade class she had met her best friend Becky Quinn. Miss Quinn has been part of Marissa’s life ever since that first day in third grade. It was also in third grade when she started to go to physical therapy for her left hip. When she was born her left hip was moved farther in than her right, leaving her a limp when she walked. People would always ask her why she walked funny for most of her life. Also in third grade she had her tonsils removed because she had strep throat eight times that year. Plus she had broken her arm falling off a ladder. The next major events of her life had taken place in middle school. This began the transition from kid to teenager. She had her first real crush, which was on a boy named Jeff. She had also started making new friends like Danya Benson and Amber Roberts. This was also when she first fell in love with art. She was forced by the school to take art but that didn’t mean it wasn’t her favorite class. She especially loved Mr. Blaze’s art class. In it she started to make more creative things, like her own buildings. This is also when she found out she wanted to be an art teacher. She then moved on to high school where she continued her art studies. When she first started high school it had seemed easy, but it gradually became harder. In ninth grade the classes were easy and fun, but then in tenth grade you had to learn more and the teachers were stricter. Conflict had also begun with her old friend Amanda Bartik. Amanda had started to become cold and mean to Marissa. Soon their friendship was over. Then in Eleventh grade she decided to take some harder classes such
as Apush and chemistry. She hardly saw any of her friends outside of school or tennis anymore. But not all was bad in eleventh grade. Latter on in this same year she had gotten a new puppy named Benjamin or Benji for short. This was a happy day for Marissa but she also knew that her older dog Amy would die soon. On the day of October 12th 2009 she had received a letter from St. Rose her dream school, she was so happy that she knocked over a can of soda. The last major event that had happened to Marissa Laven was that she found out that she was failing APUSH. It was on the 20th of October that she received this bad news. Marissa has lived though everything so far that a teenage girl should, except love. She has never had a boyfriend but she has asked a few guys that she knew for a while if they would. They always say no, but it is okay for Marissa, she has always been able to cope to being alone. Until recently she didn’t like anyone more than a friend, but then Cupid shot an arrow though her again. He is a boy in her art class and he is a senior. She has never felt this way before with any of her other crushes. As a tradition between her and her friends, they had come up with the code name Hot Coco. So if she ever wanted to talk about him and didn’t want anyone to know who she meant, she would just use his code name. She soon found out that hot coco had a girlfriend and instantly stopped liking him. She went back to liking no one except movie stars. She had gone to prom alone and had finished the rest of high school without going on a single date. She had been accepted to Saint Rose College and moved in there at the end of the twelfth grade summer. The first year of college had allowed her to explore freedoms she never had before, like staying up past ten o’clock on a weekday. She liked having only three classes
a day and not having to wake up at six in the morning to get ready for school. She loved her roommate, which was like having the cool sister she never had. She had also finally found a guy that would say yes to going on a date with her. He was from her drawing class and was so kind to her. Over the next five years she continued to work hard in getting her masters in teaching art. She had also continued dating the guy from her art class through out this time. In May 2017 Marissa Laven had graduated from Saint Rose, and acquired a teaching job at her old school Mohonasen. She first started teaching eighth grade art, but then moved up to the high school after her third year teacher. Her boyfriend from college had proposed to her after she turned twenty seven, and she said yes. Her wedding was going to be at the beach with white and purple as the main colors. She didn’t even wear a white dress; she wore a light purple dress, while her bride’s maids wore black. Everyone she knew was there even her sister with her husband Paul. Unfortunately both of her parents died shortly after her wedding. Her mother Karen had died first of lung cancer, and then ten months later her father died from a heart attack. Her and her sister had split everything and became much closer to each other. Her sister had her first child named Jimmy Bill Laven, on October 31st 2022. Marissa soon followed with her first child Amelia June Laven. After Amelia turned one, Marissa had moved her family to Italy, where she would stay for the rest of her life. While in Italy Marissa began teaching at the University both art and the English language. Her life was perfect until she learned that she had breast cancer, just like her grandmother did. While being treated at the hospital, a terrorist had
entered the hospital with a bomb strapped to his chest. Marissa was not killed by the cancer, but was killed by the terrorist’s bomb. She was 34 years old and had left her six year old daughter and husband all alone in the world. She had lived out her dream to teach others how to love art and had moved back to the land of her ancestors. She was happy and loved by all who knew her.