My dear colleagues.
My friends.
I thought of you every
day this week after Tuesday. I heard
about the aftermath on the CBC and it triggered, for me, a flash back. It hit me pretty hard, actually, because I had
been sick at home Tuesday and Wednesday.
I missed the news on Wednesday but ran head on into it on the way to
school on Thursday.
I thought of you. I thought of you and remembered 2012 and the
motley crew of kids I worked with in a trades program. You know…the ones who have trouble fitting in
to a traditional system. The ones who
need a little more patience and love. I
saw their faces and I thought of you.
I thought of a Sunday in
February of 2012 when my daughter’s frantic texts forced me to call my VP. I thought of you and remembered his first
words: “You need to sit down for
this.” I learned to hate that
phrase…more. I remembered I had been
cleaning my electric grill before my daughter’s texts. I remembered that I can’t clean that grill
today without my stomach knotting up.
“You need to sit
down. Blah blah blah blah car accident blah blah blah blah boys from the trades in
the van and three girls from our school in the car. Blah
blah blah blah D.S is dead and so is C.W…”
From that point I heard
nothing. I think he said he was
sorry. I think he told me to take
care. I know I asked about the other
boys in the van. I think he said he
didn’t have that information. I remember
the softness of the chair seat under me and how I felt as though I would sink
through it. Most of all I remember the
screaming. Someone was screaming that
D.S. was dead. Someone was screaming
“NO!” When I came back to myself, I
realised it was my voice.
The rest of the week was
a nightmare.
The next day, after the
accident, I wanted to be with the rest of the boys. I wanted to be with my teacher friends who
knew him. I did not want to be at
home. I did not want to be at home but I
had to go to school to see them. I had
to go into the portable – the last place I saw him alive – and I didn’t know if
I could do that.
I didn’t know if I could
do that. But I did and walking up those
three steps to the portable door was the most physically exhausting thing I
have ever done. My feet were made of
concrete.
I thought of you then,
and how you would be trying to muster up the emotional/mental/physical/spiritual
strength to take the long walk back into your building. How you would be thinking that you needed to
be strong for the kids and the parents and your friends even though all you
wanted to do was fall face down on your bed and scream into it until your voice
gave out.
I actually thought I
would be better after the funerals. I
thought that the “closure” would bring some relief. It did…sort of.
What I really could have
used at the time was someone to sit me down with a cup of tea or coffee and
tell me that the worst of it was the first day of “regular” classes when we
were supposed to go back to “business as usual.”
What I really could have
used was someone to sit me down with a cup of coffee or tea and tell me how to
deal with the empty chair. That was the
crusher for me. The empty chair.
That fucking empty chair
reminded me every day that he was dead.
It reminded me every day that his impish smile was gone to the
world. It reminded me that I was
expected to “stay strong for the kids” and to “stay professional.” How?
No one told me how to deal with the knot in my gut or the lump in my
throat when faced with that empty chair.
The empty chair was not,
it turns out, the worst…remember BCESIS?
Remember how you were asked to delete students off of your class lists
when they left your class? I could not
delete him. It felt like erasing him out
of my life forever and I couldn’t. And I
stumbled on that reminder the week after I came back to school after some time
off – I logged in to enter marks and ESIS asked me to delete him. I stopped breathing and thought I was going
to be sick.
I kept him on my list all
year. I let the computer delete him
because I wasn’t ready…still not ready.
Two funerals and six
weeks later, in April 2012, another car accident and another death. A graduate dear to us, a dear friend of my
daughter’s died.
We were all so practiced
that when a colleague passed in May we were starting to look over our shoulders
and wonder who would be next. We adopted
gallows humour – like soldiers or executioners – to survive.
I didn’t start seeing
colour until the summer of 2014 – or was it 2015?
Why am I telling you
this? Why am I writing this for you?
I need you to know that
the next little while is going to be crazy…ups and downs…feelings of closeness
and alienation like you may have never experienced. You will learn who your real friends are and
you will learn your breaking point. You
will learn to ask for help or to be crushed under the weight of your grief because
you want to “be strong for the kids, parents, and colleagues.”
Don’t.
Ask for a hug, a cup of
tea, a chocolate bar, a beer. Ask for a
song, a laugh, a rant session. Ask for
silence. Ask for someone to shut up and
listen. Ask for time off. Ask to walk – alone or with a sympathetic
person. Ask for bubble bath or sauna or
massage. Ask a psychic, a priest, a
shaman why this happened so you can find a place to put it inside you that
won’t infect you with anger and terror and hopelessness.
There will be moments you
don’t expect, that you hadn’t even thought would come up – if you have never
lost a student before. There will be
times like this:
You will be teaching a
lesson or going over an assignment with the class, that class, and a moment
will come up when you will say, out loud or to yourself: “s/he would have said ___ there at that
point.” That moment sucker punched
me. D.S. was funny…a smart ass…and we
were going over a worksheet as a class.
I made a comment about one of the answers and said “D would have said
___” I didn’t realise I had made the
comment out loud. The boys all looked at
me. I had to live out the rest of the
moment – I had to be real and honest. I
just said that I hadn’t expected that to happen and I needed a moment. They gave me the moment. Some hugged me after class and thanked me.
Your way will be
different. Your way will be different
but you need to know that there will be moments like this. You will expect to see her or hear her voice
and it won’t be there and you will be forced to decide how to ride it out.
Same goes for the empty
chair. I don’t know how I would have
handled the situation any differently than how I did. Maybe I would have talked to the boys and
told them that the chair was making me feel sad and ask them how they were
dealing with it. Some boys never
returned to school at all for the rest of the year. The empty chair was too heavy a burden for
them. That is how they had to deal with
their pain.
I think of you and wonder
how you are going to deal with the terror of the return – so violent was your
experience. So random and strange and
horrifying. How are you going to deal
with the fact that the horror is captured for ever on a loop? I am so sorry that is out there. I think of you and wonder of your panic
attacks and PTSD and remember that there are places I still cannot go, in the
community near my school, without feeling my breathing become constricted.
For the first little
while I didn’t even think about how to deal with that kind of stuff. I just wanted to start to feel again because I
felt nothing for a long time. Eventually,
though, the shell would crack and some light started to come in. And as the years passed, I stumbled across
some really good insights into grief.
I think of you now and I
know this won’t mean anything to you right at this moment but eventually, perhaps,
this analogy may be helpful to you: grief is like an ocean wave – some days, in
these early days – it will feel like a tsunami and you may feel like it will
take you away…and kill you if let it.
Some days it will feel like a surf wave – strong and tall but maybe you
have the means to ride it out…or fall in…either way is ok. Some days it will feel like you could fall in
or brace yourself – either way the wave only comes up to your knees. Eventually the waves will be small and slide
over your feet. You acknowledge the wave
and honour your place in it but you let it slide over you. These waves will never be the same nor will
you react to them the same as they hit you.
One day, they will wash over and away.
But maybe not today…and that is ok.
Dear colleague, friend, I
will tell you what a friend said to me in those early days of tsunami waves of
grief: “your pain is welcome here.” Those words became a life jacket for me. So I will say to you: your pain is welcome here and, as a friend of
my daughters told her, “it won’t get better, it just gets different.”
Enough platitudes.
I am truly sorry for your
pain and for the days ahead when you don’t know how you will make it. But you will.
We do.
We have.
I am sorry for the pain
and the days of doubt but know that there are people out here who have
experienced the confusion and disorientation of how to feel as a teacher when a
beloved student dies…how to deal with that empty chair…that missing voice.
Know that your pain is
welcome here and when you are ready we could just sit and drink coffee or tea or something stronger and just share a
knowing of what this is like…and if we want to talk, we can. Or not.
Message me via facebook:
Ramona L. Elke
Don’t do this alone.
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