Beyond the illusion

April 2007

 

I don't really know how to write now, not here, in public. 

 

As Joan Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, "This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning."  They are helping a bit, but I can't just throw them out there, these are words I need to hold onto because right now they seem to be all I have.

 

Yet, there is a part that tells me I need to work to maintain connections, to not just retreat like a turtle, feeding off of my own mass.  Eventually, I have to poke my little arms and legs and head out and make my slow progress onwards.

 

My students are teaching me how to do that. 

 

Lessons come where you least expect.  As does comfort. 

 

Nine days out of a school year is an eternity.  I had lived a lifetime in that week and a half.   I was a new person going back to someone else's life and job.  My administrators didn't seem to notice my absence, never mind my alteration.  I had been transported back in time, a new me meeting with a world that has not caught up with me yet.  I wanted to be back with the rest. 

 

Teenagers are notorious for being self-absorbed and generally disagreeable human beings that prey on weakness like lions and hungry packs of dogs.   Teachers mock them for dramatizing the ebbing and flowing of relationships.  I wonder where and why we lose that concern as we grow older.  I am convinced it does not make us or our lives better.

 

Teenagers also know anguish.

 

At 7:20 am, two girls hand me a big fluorescent orange poster folded into a card, decorated with stickers and inside written letters offering their condolences and comfort and sympathy.   I am glad I am at my desk, the card is big, and the students are reading silently as tears blur my vision.   Just ninth graders, the rest of the class don't know how to respond. The girls note in their card how even the boys were sad when the heard the news.  (And one boy did email me an awkward, unabashedly sincere condolence.)

 

Third period, my seniors: each walking in and coming over to give me a hug, one by one, then quietly sitting down.  I composed myself enough to stand.  One of the beautiful young ladies walked up to hand me a card.  "We all want you to know how sorry we are," she hands me the card and gives me a heartfelt, long hug, a hug of family and love.

 

It wasn't really a card, but a piece of plain white paper, folded as a card, with messages from various students in the class.  Teens love this -- writing notes in community, like signing a yearbook or t-shirt -- knowing there is strength in numbers.  They are good at this.  Their messages contained a sincerity not watered down by appropriate phrases or worries about offending my faith or my family.  With the confidence of youth, who believe they are discovering all in the world for the first time, they remind me how my mother is in a better place, looking down at my teaching and proud; they offer to help me laugh and get through this, even just listen if I needed to talk.

 

Suddenly, all the professionalism I try so hard to maintain between my students and I, thankfully, melted away.  There we were, human beings stumbling through life, though I have been doing it a bit longer. 

 

This reminds me of my mother, who even in the grip of illness, never lost this adolescent, childlike genuine concern for others. 

 

I thank these students for reminding me that this compassion exists in other places, for seeing an inkling of this legacy of my mother in me, and for sharing it with me as I relearn how to live my life as this new me, this orphaned me.

 

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Addendum:  

It has taken a few weeks to feel comfortable posting this.  I wondered if this new territory into which I ventured, emotionally, with my students would be a short trip.  It is not.  I should mention the new joy I have been able to find in my fifth period class, one that has been a rocky relationship.   I continue to get little notes from time to time, little words and gestures that let me know the students know that though I function, this loss weighs upon me.  We laugh more, though, and share more deeply.   Oddly, the opposite seems to have occurred in many of my other relationships.  Adults like to think that I am functioning, not dwelling upon my loss, not feeling sorry for myself.  I am busy.  They buy the illusion.   I, at times, buy the illusion, need the illusion.  I am also thankful for being able to set that aside, to be both functioning and mourning in one instant, to live and to remember, not in opposition but simply as the experience of the moment.