Now there's an empty chair in my classroom.
We all know why it's empty. The sixteen of us -- fifteen of us -- have been in this classroom since August of 2013, when we first came together for 11th Grade Language & Literature. I've loved this class dearly for the last year and a half, despite the bizarre gender ratio: thirteen boys and three girls.
Two girls.
She passed away in her sleep over the Chinese New Year break. There was no real warning -- she felt ill on Tuesday night, went to bed, and didn't wake up. It's every parent's nightmare, and every teacher's, and every friend's, and -- well, every human's, really. How does a seventeen year-old girl die in her sleep?
No one sits in her chair, even when it would be more convenient to what we're doing in class. Her best friend still sits beside it. It doesn't exactly hurt to look, but I still have to force myself to acknowledge it, this void that hovers in the corner of my eye: sacred, inviolate.
This has been our normal for the last month. On our first day back from break, we spoke about her. My students -- mostly big, tough, twelfth grade boys -- were gruff and generous with their tears and their feelings. They told each other that it is strong to remember and grieve and love. I've never been more proud of them.
I reminded my students that grief is messy. I told them that it moves in mysterious ways. I revealed that I hadn't yet cried about her death, and that I wasn't sure when I would; that the tears would probably come bursting out of me at the most ordinary of times: standing in the supermarket line or watching The Mindy Project or teaching a lesson on how to organize a body paragraph.
The tears didn't come, though. I felt fine. And yet, over the next few days, I became increasingly anxious about my students and my friends. I felt as if I were closing ranks: people I loved on the inside, and everyone else on the outside. I wrote to Shari:
And the thing is, I'm FINE. I'm seriously feeling fine. I mean, my stomach is totally fucked up and I can't sleep, so I'm probably sublimating this somehow, but emotionally, it still hasn't hit. I saw her empty seat. I wrote her report on her report card. Her friends have cried in front of me. And I'm FINE. What the hell is wrong with me? I was more distraught when the South Korean ferry sank.
Mostly what I'm feeling is this overwhelming love for all my students. (Except for my ninth graders, who I kind of want to smack, but FINE, EVEN THEM.) I don't have room for anything but that. And it's so overwhelming that it's ruining my productivity and my sleep, and I don't have lesson plans, and I have parent teacher conferences soon with NOthing in the gradebook except for my grade 12s, and I'm barely even thinking about her because I'm worrying so hard about her friends and then the rest of my kids and ALL of them, I just love them SO MUCH. Too much to function. God, that sounds so CREEPY, but I promise it isn't, really.
So I guess maybe I'm not "fine". I feel like I'm going to explode. But it's with everyone else, not me. And not her. And that doesn't feel fair to her.It's that thing, right? It's missing your student, and wanting to mourn, and then NOT mourning, and then feeling guilty for not mourning, and then hating yourself for being so selfish and making it about YOU. Even in this blog post, I am making this about me.
The weeks went on. I wrote, memorized, and performed a Vagina Monologue, along with some amazing students and teachers. (I will certainly not be reproducing that monologue here, except to tell you that the title was "Marvel Comics Presents: The Amazing Battle Vagina vs. The Insidious Legions of Crippling Self-Loathing".) I made it through parent-teacher conferences, and my tenth graders made it through graded discussion, and my ninth graders made it through the trial scene of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Her friends organized a memorial, and planned it for last Friday. Her art teacher asked me to be a speaker. I curled myself into a sofa in the Commons, plugged my mother's version of the Goldberg Variations into my ears, and thought about her, hard, for the first time. This, with her name removed, is what I wrote:
I first knew her through a poem.
She was a quiet student. We English teachers are privileged in that we can know our quiet students through their reading of a work of literature. That sounds clinical and academic, but I promise that it’s not: I believe in the power of words and of sentences. I believe in the power of poetry – not as a silly, romantic, inconsequential thing, but as a real power; one that can join us to each other or rearrange our worlds.
She was nervous about her own words; she was uncomfortable with her spoken English, and did not often raise her hand in class. How appropriate, then, that one of the first poems we read as a class was “Search for my Tongue,” by Sujata Bhatt, a poem in which a native speaker of Gujarati discusses the difficulties of living in an English-speaking land.
She wrote that she felt a connection with Bhatt’s experiences: that she often felt disassociated from the Korean language while living overseas, but she felt a kinship with the idea – and I quote – that Bhatt’s native tongue would often just burst out, even when she thought that she had already forgotten about it.
And because she was who she was, she loved the beauty of Bhatt’s language. She saw that Bhatt’s description of her Gujarati is full of words that are connotative of life – that Bhatt’s native tongue is budding, blossoming, and growing.
She was brave. Next year, she was to go to another foreign land, a land where her mother tongue might, as Bhatt says, “rot and die” in her mouth. She knew, though, from her experience in other foreign lands – Vietnam and China – that her Korean would always, if prompted, burst out of her mouth.
I know that it had been about four years since she’d visited Korea, and I am so glad that she got to be in the land of her mother tongue once more.
She did for me what every teacher wishes for – she helped me to see the content of my class in a new way. She looked at Bhatt’s poem with clear eyes, and was unafraid to look at herself in relation to the poem with the same steady gaze.
And in a way, it couldn’t be more appropriate that I will forever associate her with this poem, because it is a poem about finding a sense of home in the most foreign of places, about finding an abundance of nature in a barren waste, and about finding life in death.
Bhatt begins the poem with death – with the rotting of her native tongue, cut off from nourishment in a foreign land. She ends with life – with the blossoming of the tongue against all odds.
In my last line of her college recommendation, I wrote that I couldn’t wait to see what art she would unleash upon the world. And it’s true: I will so very much miss seeing the world through her eyes. In this way, the world has been robbed.
But! She will grow back, blossoming into our world. Through her art – strewn throughout the school – you all have seen a piece of her soul, even if you never spoke a word to her. That piece of soul will go with you wherever you go in the world, along with all the other pieces of soul that you’ve collected along the way. You will pass it along to others.
And as you all grow and leave WAB, she will remain: a guardian, of sorts, to watch over new generations of WAB students. They will see her art, and they will know her, and she will be here.
Because that’s what humans are, really: pieces of each other’s souls, and of art, and of chemicals, and of poetry.
So I’m going to read the poem:
Search for my Tongueby Sujata Bhatt
You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.
I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream,it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Every time I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth.
It's an okay speech. It's certainly true to what I know and love about her. But on Friday, in front of the entire school, it felt impersonal, showy, and self-absorbed. I've never been more miserable when speaking in front of an audience.
Because there were 500 usually-goofy teenagers in front of me and they'd been sitting there for thirty minutes, and you could hear a pin drop. Because I'd watched them file in one-by-one, laying white carnations in front of her photo. Because her parents were in the audience, with her friends' parents, with their friends. Because her friends were sobbing. Because my students were sobbing.
Because her father spoke, and her friends spoke, and her art teacher spoke, my principal spoke, and I spoke, and we all kept saying the same things, and it became horribly, gut-wrenchingly apparent that we were all speaking about the same, wonderful person, and that she would never sit in my classroom again, because she was gone.
I didn't cry during the ceremony. I waited until the gym was almost empty, and then I strode out, leading with my forehead, my Oxfords clicking against the floor, sweat saturating my scalp, my face wrinkling. I shut myself in a bathroom stall and told myself to cry.
Nothing.
So I left the bathroom, went to collect my computer from my most recently-used classroom, and stopped in at the reception. I ate a piece of sushi. I shifted my weight uncomfortably and wandered a little bit.
And a sob ripped out of me. My face scrunched up again, and I clapped a hand over my mouth. A friend gave me a side-armed hug, and we talked for a bit, tears running down our faces. I thought I had it under control, so I went back to the thick of the reception, but the assistant principal gave me a hug and another sob came.
I tried to get out of there, almost running, looked to the left, and saw her father: another rip, another sob. I kept walking, until a friend almost forced me into a hug for one, two, three heaving breaths.
Some good friends took me home and let me use their shower and fed me beef stew. In return, I made them chocolate espresso cheesecake and introduced them to Friday Night Lights. I started to breathe. And I started to be able to think about her without crying: not her friends, not her parents, not my parents, but her.
I wish with every part of me that I hadn't broken down during that reception. It felt like grandstanding: tone deaf and self-important. This whole blog post, my whole speech, and my whole existence feel self-indulgent right now, but I guess that's going to have to be okay. As Shari and Sarah keep reminding me, grief is messy. There are no rules. And the most self-indulgent thing I could be really doing is to obsess about the way I grieve.
Mostly, I just miss her. I keep making sixteen copies instead of fifteen. I wish she'd come back. I wish I had a piece of her art to hang in my classroom. I wish her chair weren't so damn empty.
We've always checked in with each other during the first five minutes of class, moving around the room clockwise from my chair. Because she was directly seated on my right, we don't have to skip over her. Her best friend speaks last now instead of her and then I start class.
And every day, there's a brief, hanging moment in between, into which she might have spoken.
I have lost three students and one co-worker. I know that empty chair well.
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