Rosie was my bus driver. She was sweet, kind, and all the kids loved her. She was able to make any child happy in heartbeat. She was a glow of warmth in a pool of grownups that were always concerned with other 'more important' things.

Not only was she my bus driver, she was my great grandmother. She wasn't that old though, only in her sixties. She was really my, step-great-grandmother, but I always considered her as close as my own parents.

Every day was fun with her. I'd always taken for granted everything about her, but then again, I was only six or seven. I wasn't concerned about life or death.

But it soon took a sharp turn. Rosie began to miss days, and I thought nothing of it. My little brain wasn't understanding that something was terribly wrong.

It wasn't until a substitute began to drive all the time that I began to worry. Where was my Rosie?

I asked my grandmother that, that day. Grandma had told me Rosie was sick, and she just couldn't come on the bus yet. I had bitten my lip and shrugged. As long as she came back, I'd be okay.

But day after day, she never came back. The warmth coming from the substitute seemed artificial somehow; not the same.

That's why I was so heartbroken the morning I woke up and my parents told me. I had fallen to peices, momories of Rosie flashing by in my head of all the times she had made me feel special, made me feel better on the darkest days.

I shiver now as I write this, because in the other room sits a large blue stuffed dog, given by Rosie herself only days before her death.

I usd to picture every adult as indestructible, untouchable. But after Rosie's death, it kind of dawned on me, like a epiphany - people die from things all the time. My small eyes had been too vain to see that.

As I've grown older, I learned that Rosie had died of skin cancer. She had had round the clock nurses in her house until she died. I ran the Relay for Life for her, in honor of her suffering, in honor of her pain.

Rosie was MY hero. A real role model. To this day, she's still Rosie the Great, only now, my eyes are wider and my brain is larger. Now I can tell the difference between life and death, and Rosie was just the biginning of a lifetime full of heart wrenching deaths. But I'll always remember her spirit and spread it to others.