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.
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