Requiem

Right now, according to Bloomberg News, there are 268 people trapped in a sunken ferry off the coast of South Korea.  28 more people have been confirmed dead.  Of the estimated 475 people on board, 325 of them were high school students in the eleventh grade, on a school trip.  This means that almost half -- and probably more -- of the missing were teenagers.  And given that the ship sank about two days ago, we can probably assume that those we've been counting as missing can be added to the ranks of the dead.

We should mourn every death, I know.  There were fathers and mothers and grandparents on that boat, as well as grown-up sons and daughters and nieces and nephews.  But I can't stop thinking:  how does a school come back from the death of over half of its junior class? 

It's the teenagers that haunt me.  It's always the teenagers that haunt me.  That must be common for high school teachers, right?  I think of all the eleventh graders I've taught -- over 250 at this point -- and I want to see them all right now.  I want them to be in front of me being ridiculous and laughing and making fun of my flailing limbs and giving stupid excuses for not having their work done and startling me with their insights and being the wonderful humans that I know they are, even if I occasionally want to kill them.

The ship took two and a half hours to submerge fully.  There was enough time to evacuate, but the students were told to stay in their cabins.   They sank slowly.

At the end of my year of student teaching, a veteran teacher warned me to tell my students that I loved them, because "you'll never know when one of them won't be there the next day."

And now there are children in the water.  Now.  They're not mine, but they're there, and they're dead, or they're drowning.  This is happening now.

And they were ridiculous and made their teachers laugh, and they tried to make excuses for late work, and their parents loved them, and their insights lit up the world, and they broke their parents' hearts when they lied or cheated or got a bad grade, and now their parents' hearts are broken for real.  And so are their teachers'.

How does a school come back from that?  Is it even possible?

I'm sitting in my ninth grade class.  Their presentations on different books of the Odyssey start in three minutes; they've been working as I write this, and I'm writing it because I need to, because I don't know what else to do.  Two of them are being ridiculous and staging the bloodbath that takes place when Odysseus gets home.  Somehow, a golf club has gotten involved.  I love them all so much, and I want to cry.

Because.  There are children in the water.

Everything about this is inadequate.  Nothing anyone can ever say about this will be enough.   The actions of the crew, what's done to help the parents, anything that I could ever write -- none of it is even barely adequate.  

I emailed my friend Shari, one of the wisest people I know, with all these feelings earlier today, and this was her reply:

"Actually, really, just loving people fucks you over.  Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?  But it’s also like there’s no point to life if you don’t live it with great love, so we keep stumbling on, loving each other, doing everything badly, fucking up, and praying we survive those moments in which everything is forever changed.  Everything. How are those moments survivable? I don’t know.  I pray I never know, but I also know that I’m not special, and that tomorrow is promised to none of us."

And somehow, that's everything.  It doesn't make me feel any better, but it makes me realize that this THING is shared by every teacher who's ever loved her students, by every parent who's ever loved his children, and by anyone who's ever loved anyone.

That's everything.  And it's still not enough.