Tragedy

Yesterday during the chaos between second and third periods, one of my colleagues asked me if I taught a certain student. I said yes, he'd been one of mine last year. The colleague went on to tell me that that student had committed suicide the night before.

Nothing in any education class prepares you for news like this. There is no training anywhere adequate for words like that. I felt like someone had punched me, and I started to cry. I can still see him, even right at this very moment. He was a tall, tall guy. He played basketball for us, and he was quiet, but so sweet. He had a mischievous grin and a clever sense of humor.

He struggled academically, but together, we worked hard and got him through the course and to graduation. I hadn't heard from him since he left our school, but that's the case with about 98 percent of my graduates. Unless I see them out in the community or hear from a younger sibling who happens to pass through my room at some point, I don't usually know much about them once they leave.

I went back into my room, and I tried to get on with class, but I knew my students would know more details, and I had to ask. They told me more about it. He'd broken up with a longtime girlfriend, he'd been living with his sister, he'd lost his beloved grandmother and never gotten over it, and ultimately, he'd felt there was nothing left for him. That sweet, funny, gentle kid felt that life was over for him before he turned 20. I sat at my desk, in front of my students, something you're probably never supposed to do, and cried. I couldn't stop.

I went and got a teacher from across the hall who was on his planning period to keep them for a few minutes and pulled myself back together as best I could, but the rest of the day was very hard for me. I was teaching Ophelia's death in AP, and just talking about suicide was almost more than I could bear. I kept wanting to stop class and just say to all of them, "If you ever reach the point where you think you don't matter to anyone else in this world, know that I will cry for you. Come see me. You may not think anybody else cares, but I do. I will listen to anything you have to say, just don't decide to end your life."

As I was getting my hair cut yesterday evening, I told my beautician, "I love what I do, but some days, I really hate this job. Today, I think I would be happier flipping burgers." At that moment, I meant it. One of the beautiful parts of teaching is getting to know all these wonderful kids, even for the brief time that we get to be a part of their lives. It's one of the things I like better about K-12 than about college. In college, it's very hard to make contact with your students; it's impersonal. In K-12, the structure of teaching is about building relationships. Unfortunately, those relationships also come with pain sometimes when loss occurs.

All day long, I kept staring at the desk where he sat last year. Oddly enough, nobody sits in that desk in any class I have this year. It's an empty desk this year. For me, that emptiness became acutely poignant yesterday. In the silences of my off periods, I could almost see him sitting there again, long basketball player legs sticking out into the aisles again, and I so wished that he'd found somebody somewhere who could have met his need.