Five Years like yesterday

Turns out we’d both had a rough week. February 13 was the fourth anniversary of her younger brother’s death. He was 7 when he died; she was 12. She had been in denial, never speaking of it, never thinking of it, had put him and the grief out of her mind—he had been sick all of his life, diagnosed with a rare disease I can’t remember the name of, but she said it in two ways and even described it and all I heard was the debilitating way he had begun to diminish from his first birthday until he died at the age of 7. 

She said last year she was playing a concert on her 16th birthday, just days after the third anniversary of his death, when it all suddenly flooded to and through her without warning. It had just simply taken her over for the duration of the concert. She described how she just kept playing her instrument but was blinded by streams of tears and it didn’t let up the whole time. “I mean it was my sweet sixteen,” she said. “I was supposed to be happy and enjoying it but all I could think was how I didn’t deserve it. I was here and he wasn’t.”

But since then, over the last year, she has been able to talk about it a little bit with friends and now here in our Extended Essay meeting. Her mother rarely speaks of it but, immediately after he died, began studying to be, and now is, a social worker. Her father has never spoken about any of it. 

My week, too, had been hellish and all I could think of was getting home and decompressing with a four-day weekend—with only One Billion Rising to worry about. I needed to rest; I was spent and exhausted. I craved the solitude ahead and time stretching out through the next several days of just being. It had been all I could do to walk through the last few days and the charade of school work, planning, assessing, interacting, teaching.  Worst two days in years. Completely at the mercy of unrelenting grief.

I had forgotten we were scheduled for a meeting but fortunately she is a student in my last block class and she remembered. She is bright and has a glow about her I noticed right away when she first came to class August of last year as a sophomore. Ethereal, charming, with a fabulous imagination; she has already written a full length novel full of fantastical ideas—rather dark, as I recall, and more science fiction, aliens sort of thing. Her long, curly blond hair adds to her faerie like presence and I can easily see her living in Rivendell.

She has chosen to work with three stories that have trauma as the driving force of the narrative. How the narrative voice is shaped by this trauma; I can’t recall specifically the finer points. Each novel has a different style and a different trauma: death of a young sibling, death of a lover, death of a parent at an early age. Yet each of the first person narratives seems to play out the struggle with commonality in the distortion of the unreliability.  I asked her what drew her to such macabre, dark narratives?

That question led to the revelation of the 4th anniversary of her brother’s death yesterday as the same day as the 5th anniversary of Dad’s terminal diagnosis. We discussed how uncanny grief is and how it strikes without warning or seeming connectivity to the present and that no matter how much time passes, it doesn’t have any bearing on the actual strike whenever it chooses to violate the present.

As deep and profound as we got in this meeting, it only lasted 20 minutes. It was lovely to be able to speak of the most intensely painful thing each of us had ever experienced...that we both had this horrific anniversary the day before...how we had been each completely tsunamied by the intensity of emotion just yesterday, yet now we could speak of everything with clarity, completely transparent, unweighted, painless, only a day later.

She gathered her things to go and I gave her directives for following up with a written reflection in the software, and to upload the outline she’d shown me, and that I would be writing a summary also.  Then she stood there for a moment and we just were quiet for a brief second and she said, this was good.  I agreed. She added, this was kinda therapeutic. I nodded.  It’s nice, she said, to be able to talk about it all with someone who knows what it’s like. 

Likewise.

A Brother's Conscience

This story is going to sound cliche. Because it is. But it’s true. Every word. Even the adage, “Ya just never know.” We say that a lot at school—when it comes to kids...and not knowing what they might be going through at home or in their heads.

I got a big surprise yesterday and I’m still trying to figure out what to do (if anything) about it...or how to follow up with it.

I have three classes of pre-IB sophomores–that means they’re about 15 years old. All about social development and hormones and being terrified of “exposure.” Takes a lot for these kids to risk revealing who they really are: rejection is real and devastating, they fear.

Since the first week of January we’ve been working with poetry. Started them off with performance poetry as a path to studying structured poetry, trying to make it more accessible , more friendly.  We’ve read and tested on Mary Oliver’s Handbook of Poetry and every day we’ve watched videos I’ve carefully selected of slam poetry, performance poetry, and spoken word poetry. After each poem they are asked to write their impressions, not just of the content but of the choices the poet has made to deliver their words effectively. Volume, cadence, word choice, prosody, pacing, sound, metaphor, internal rhyme, sensory imagery, body language, gestures, all of it.

They’ve been working in solitude as well as small groups to develop their own performance poem. I’ve encouraged them to pick topics that tap into their passion about ... something, anything.  You guessed it—that’s everything from ice cream, to loss, to pollution, to shoes, to relationships, to self image...all of it.

One of the aspects of teaching at South Fork that I love is how many cultures are represented through these kids. They are Irish, Scandinavian, African, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Guatemalan, and more.  This is the kind of assignment that sometimes taps into those identities in unexpected ways. One Vietnamese boy wrote of his sorrow at seeing how leaving Vietnam has been so painful for his parents and how his identity is fractured by it.

Another student, a very quiet young man, Hispanic, never ever says a word. Nice, respectful, mostly lost in an English Literature class and struggles with it all (not the language, but the study of literature and analysis).  I’ve spoken with him a couple of times since August, trying to find a way to support him, get him help with it.  He’s holding his own, but he seems so disengaged.  I was afraid he wouldn’t have much to offer–he keeps to himself so completely.  He has friends, he’s well-adjusted, he’s just not socially connected with the kids in this class (except maybe three other guys).

Yesterday was his dress rehearsal—they have this opportunity to see how well they’ve internalized their material, hear what it sounds like while delivering to an audience, test out their plan for body language and gestures and pacing.  His turn came up.  Yes, I confess I do pray at those moments because more than anything I don’t want the experience to add to their fears or any negative experiences of similar assignments.  He took a deep breath when I gave him the cue to start. He had nothing in his hands—most kids keep their poem with them in case they sort of melt into stage fright and blank out.  He stood, rubbed his hands together and started his poem.  There was gentle internal rhyming, vivid images, deep emotion.  It was a poem honoring and apologizing to his little brother.  He spoke of how his mom told him not to be like his older brothers who have been in trouble with the law. He spoke of how his mom introduced him to his baby brother when he was brought into the world and encouraged him to be a better big brother to him—to love him, protect him, help him grow up. He confessed — and was specific — about times he’d failed his little brother. Times he was mean to him.  How sorry he was, how he hopes that recent changes have made a difference for him. How he kept his emotions in check is beyond me, he frequently covered his chin and stopped speaking for a brief moment, tears brimmed in his eyes, but he kept going. This young man, who had never said more than 10 words in class since August, delivered his poem for over 5 minutes in front of class full of 15 year old kids who sat in rapt attention.  That’s 25 kids in that classroom.  No one even looked away. 

He finished, everyone clapped, like they had done for all the others.  And he sat back in his seat—front seat of the second row.  He was the last of the rehearsal list and I was a weepy mess. I made some comment about how there wasn’t a dry eye in the room and that this was an amazing piece of work.  Then I told them all to stand up and stretch a little bit, take a small break.  NOBODY went up to this kid.  Nobody.  They huddled in twos and threes, walking around to each other and chatting.  I confess at first I was surprised until I recalled their age, and their lack of maturity in knowing how or what to say—vulnerability is a dangerous, bottomless pit.  I went up to the kid, put my hands on his shoulders and leaned over toward him, my forehead to his and said, “That was awesome. Amazing. Thank you.” And he nodded.

Ya just never know.

I learn a lot about courage, pain, hope, and the power of the human spirit from these amazing young people. Deeply grateful for them.