"New classroom, new students, old joys."
- blog entry , September 14, 2010

Old sorrows, too. I haven't been able to get one particular student off my mind of late. I couldn't figure out why, really. I was deliberately thinking about him in terms of exactly how I would describe him for the blog entry character sketch series I am committed to... but this was more that that. Last night over dinner with Christy and Suzanne, it suddenly became clear. A lot of things became clear. THIS one was that he was my student in this new/old classroom I have moved back into for this school year.

He was young. I think it was 2002. He was in a class of students much less cognitively capable than he was. He was charming. He beamed. (Trying to describe that indescribable incandescence, again!) He also cried. He could say one word. It was "Yes." He was quadriplegic. He lived in a group home. He cried a lot. I had an inordinate number of support staff working in my class. That means that the physical issues in my classroom merited it. I would read stories to twelve students, but only one could understand them. I would hold the book in one hand and rub whatever part of his body he was complaining about with the other. One staff person in particular would complain that I was spoiling him. It soothed him. Do what works was my rationale. Human touch works. I do not care what anyone has to say about that. If a child is soothed by indulging their wants, really where is the harm? They will expect the same treatment in the future would be some one's answer.

Whatever. In the last week that I saw him, his cry had changed. And it was not shoulder or leg that wanted rubbing. It was his stomach. He took longer to calm. He cried more often. I was more than concerned. There is a lot about this that I won't go into. I will say this: there was a three day weekend at hand. I went to my then relatively new principal and said, essentially, this: I want you to call the group home and tell them he cannot return to school without a full physical. She asked some questions. My answer was "I think he is gravely ill." She asked some more questions. I answered again "I think he is gravely ill," and this time I added "I am not using that word lightly." She said she was sure I wasn't.

Again, you know how this story ends. The weekend passed. He was in the hospital by Saturday. He died soon after. Cancer throughout. When we returned to school, in the office, clocking in, I heard the news. The principal wasn't in yet. When she did arrive, she came looking for me directly. I turned to go out of my classroom and had started down the hall when we saw each other. She was walking towards me with open arms. [ This is significant because she has retired and we are since strongly advised not to embrace each other or our students. ] We were both fighting back tears. She said she was sorry. I said I was too... and sorry that I was correct.

I said when I began these vignettes that they would be about the students I had lost as well as meaningful encounters with other professionals. This particular principal was a master. I will speak of her again regarding her support involving another student of mine who slowly left us. But really, in the scheme of things, what I have already said about her was, in my experience, remarkable. She listened. She really listened. And she showed genuine warmth, support and attention.

I wrote what appears below not too long after he passed away. I can be quite esoteric, so to elaborate...

Once when it snowed, I went out a door just outside the school cafeteria that no one was supposed to use to get some snow for Franki (a quadriplegic kid never gets to play in the snow and he had nodded to me that he wanted some) and quickly made a snowman in a pie tin. Whoever had gone out that door was about to get their head chewed off by the aforementioned principal, but when she saw me hurriedly coming in and already talking to him as I turned the corner, I watched her swallow her reprimand and smile. This is why he reminded us of snow. As I already have noted the only word he could say was 'yes,' so that is in here as well. The reason I said he was in someone else's eyes is because we heard his were donated after his death... and when the radiator clanged in my classroom for months I would think it was him blowing me a kiss. (I imagine that this winter I will hear that sound again and look up with the same expectation.) Who says writing poetry is hard? Poetry is real life written down in a stack of short lines with a little bit of added constraint!



Franki,

We wake to find who has fallen in the night.
When this news touches us we crumble.
In our classroom the shape of the space you occupied changes.
You are walking through it.

For days, each time the wind whips around us,
we are startled into the sting of the loss of you.
When the radiator clangs we look up
thinking you have blown us a kiss.

We'd like to place a thin black frame around our mourning.
We will miss this and this and this.
But you are everywhere: in snow, in tears, in "yes,"
and behind someone else's eyes.

I've found the disk with your photograph.
When the MacIntosh whirrs and follows our command,
you smile at us again
and we throw our arms around it.


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All photographs and text, unless otherwise noted, copyright (c) 2010 C.M. Carroll