When I was 16 my father left me to do one thing in life and I failed. My father was a celebrated chemist who taught at Cornell for 52 years before he retired to relax and pursue his own interests in life. Growing up my father was born in a war zone in Poland, the Germans were trying to persecute jews. My father was an orthodox jew and was nearly caught and sent to a concentration camp with the rest of his family but managed to escape. He managed to escape to the boat but when he got on, a German soldier caught him and sent his father and mother to their death, never to be seen again. He, however, managed to duck out from eyesight and run to where the baggage was being stowed. He lived on the ship for 27 days, surviving on the spare food that the passengers would toss into the garbage. Eventually, the boat docked in the United States and my father hid in a piece of baggage that he had poked holes into so he could breathe. He was carried in that bag to a fancy house. When the bag was opened, a young in fine white clothes named Emily jumped and screamed for her husband, John, and mother, charlotte. After some talk he managed to stay with them until he managed to locate his other family. My father had lied about having a family to them and when Charlotte had found out she decided to adopt him. My father was sent out to a boarding school in northern Iowa where he studied diligently so that one day he could go to university. He graduated top of his class where he and was accepted to Harvard. He always had an interest in law as he wanted to persecute the people who had brutally murdered his mother in father. After two years he decided that law was not for him and he decided to become a chemist. He loved everything about the elements and the periodic table. After studying hard he graduated from Harvard at the top of his class with a 4.8GPA and spent a year with his family looking for a job and just enjoying being done with school. However, he decided that he needed to learn more so he could find out more about a question that had plagued his mind his whole life. He decided to attend University at Cornell and graduated again at the top of his class with this time a 4.9GPA. The staff at Cornell asked him if he wanted to take up a job to teach more kids about the ideas he had studied. He happily accepted and began to teach at Harvard. Every day after his teaching he would go to his office and look for the answer to the one question. When I was born every once in a while I would go to my father’s workplace and see his office. It was a place with papers tossed all around the floor, string used to connect ideas and evidence, and I would see him pulling his hair out trying to find the answer to this one question. When I was 15 my father has diagnosed with Stage 4 Cancer and was told he had a couple of months left to live at most. One day he sat me down and told me of the question that was plaguing his mind and told me that I must find out the answer before I die. He died 5 months later and I began to work on the answer to this one question. I would stay locked up in my room for days on end trying to find out what his ideas were and connect them to each other. Now I am writing this 70 years later when I only have a few months left to live. I sit here writing to you son, see if you can continue the quest to find out, *who asked?* Maybe the reason I can’t figure out what the reason is is that there is no one, *nobody asked…*