Thank you all for your love today. I can’t post this publicly quite yet, but this is – my day today.
A teenage boy at the school where I work, a junior, was killed in an auto accident today. I have been in crisis mode with our admin team since this morning, working on wordsmithing and crafting announcements with our school head to send to our families.
We just concluded the assembly where the news of the death, delivered to faculty one-on-one by admin team runners moments before the subsequent gathering, was given to the students.
I stood and watched the bravado and posturing of teens as they gathered, not knowing what was to come. The few astute students with furrowed brows worried, knowing that assemblies are not just called out of the blue here. There was a very, very perfect silence from the students as they sat on the floor and the mezzanine, waiting.
The absolute attention given to the Head of School – for 450-odd teenagers, even our excellent ones who are usually attentive for teens, was like being on a knife’s point.
An announcement was read, firm and sad, but understanding, from the Head of School, and there was that moment of even deeper silence before sudden tears and sounds of shock escaped before their hands clasped over their gaping mouths, fluttering up like heavy butterflies.
They shuffled from the space as though chained together, clustering, whispering, quiet, save for the few immobilized by shock and grief, who sat, stricken, on the gleaming wood floor. Triads and dyads lingered and dispersed to seemingly more private places to share their mutual grief.
The building is old and it echoes. Those seeking a place of solitude are ever denied it here – their remote mourning bounced from wall to wall to wall as through the granite and plaster were weeping with them, the sound seeming never to fade.
The morning had been rainy. The sun was beginning to come out and filter through the old windows, brightening the auditorium. As each of those young people entered these familiar halls, they brought their innocence and the towering audacity that only those who truly believe they are immortal and entitled to life have.
It is a gruesome thing to watch words shatter it, like rocks through a window, making all their sparkle fall into shards upon the floor.
It is horrible to see the soft sunlight drift aimlessly across clenched hands, and reddening eyes, touching the beautiful curls and shining straightened locks of hair which will, later, be gripped and rent in confusion and grief.
It is impossible to look at them and not want, with all of your being, to take their pain for yourself, so that they can remain in that carefree, perfect state of existence, and to assure them that they can hold on – hold ON – to their ruined belief that they are mountains which cannot be conquered by anything, including death. They ought not know how brief it can be, and how unfair. And yet, there is always a time when that must happen, and that day must come. For some sooner, for some later, for some: today.
But the sun is full out now, and the clouds have shifted from gray to white, and it is a beautiful fall day. It is a beautiful day to lose a friend, a classmate, a teammate, a brother, a son. It is beautiful day to walk out into the world, with the glitter of shattered illusions stuck, glinting, to your shoes.