My Dearest CAS Juniors,
I can hardly believe we’ve arrived at this place. When I met you, your reputation had preceded you. You were known as a spirited group, pretty touchy feely, bordering on gropey. I was told you were a little on the lazy side but knew how to pull it together if pushed. You were known for being loving and sweet and yes, even quite intelligent.
The night after the first day of school, I sat with a cup of tea and some really milky Swiss chocolate and read your “First day letters” to myself. They were a reflection of some of the battle wounds you had endured in the previous years, most notably being left behind by teacher after teacher, abandoned puppies looking for a new home. It made me so sad to think that one of your biggest concerns was being left again. I promised you up and down, in and out, that I wouldn’t get pregnant, wouldn’t get sick, wouldn’t get bored, and wouldn’t, as much as I could help it, leave you. I now see how naïve I was, making you those promises because not only did I end up having to leave temporarily, I wasn’t able to protect you from being left by others, from being left by Kyle. But I’ll get to Kyle in a minute.
It feels like light years since that first week of school but I’m pretty certain I fell in love with you immediately. I’m kind of like the Statue of Liberty, asking for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free. In other words, I’m a sucker for lost puppies. But what made me notice you most was your ability to engage, so deeply, in the work we were doing. Teaching you history has been such a thrill because you have always been so curious about it, so knowledgeable, and so eager to relate it in concrete ways to your everyday lives. I’d find myself hearing NPR reports or reading the NY Times and wondering how you’d respond, what you’d think, what questions you’d have for me. It’s the way school and learning should be—actively engaged, always in a dialogue, never searching for AN answer rather always asking more questions. I looked forward to Friday current events days with you and purposely wrote a grant so we could get those NY Times Up Front Magazines and read them together, one big happy nerdling CAS family. You were witty, you were brave, and you woke me up every morning. For all of that, I am eternally grateful.
Second semester felt like a completely different year than the one we started together. Sevan’s leg break on February 27th shook me up pretty hard. Once we knew he would eventually be okay, the work of actually taking care of him and simultaneously being away from you was very painful. It was hard to find a day when I didn’t feel like a terrible mother, a terrible teacher, or both. I felt like our family pulled through in large part because of the community we had in CAS, the support I had from adults and kids alike, and the love you gave me in all the ways you know how (facebook, texting, etc) to make it okay for me to be gone. And I dropped to sleep every night feeling so lucky. Every night until March 31st. And then our earth shattered before our very eyes, the ground dropped out from under us, and all of a sudden we were the most UNlucky people on the planet. The phone call from Leib the night that Kyle died dropped me to my knees on my kitchen floor. And in many ways, I’ve been there ever since. There is no template for this, no lesson plan, no book on tape, college lecture, or ten page research paper that teaches you how to navigate the loss of a student, a friend, a son. It’s as if the whole world starts over. We are re-born into a new world. We’ve left the world with Kyle behind and now we live in the world without Kyle. Two different worlds. But we don’t have the comforts of birth: being held around the clock, fussed over, screaming at the world, and most importantly, babies have NO idea—their ignorance protects them. And we didn’t have that either. Nothing was able to protect us from the pain of losing Kyle. The way he died made it worse. It was stupid and senseless and bad luck that could have happened to any of us. I couldn’t even make any sense out of it for you. I was at a loss. If I looked like I knew what I was doing in trying to take care of the community, I didn’t. I just followed my gut, my heart, and the very deep caverns of my sorrow and knew I just wanted to be around you. The days immediately after Kyle’s death, culminating with his funeral were the beginnings of our collectively broken heart. There was this moment at the burial, the deafening rain pounding through us, six or seven of us in a huddled mass dripping over one another and I looked across the big hole in the ground where we would unfairly leave Kyle, and I saw another cluster of you with shovels in hand, stepping up bravely one after the other to bury your friend. The world all of a sudden felt like a very cruel place. I felt so incapable of protecting you from grief, from your pain, from the sadness, and from growing up too soon. As someone who has spent a decade recreating history to fit neatly into the hearts and minds of young people, there was nothing I could do about this piece of your history, nothing to neaten it, box it up, clean it up, or make you look at in a different way. Real life, as it turns out, has nothing to do with history.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do which was keep you close. In the daytime in the nighttime, on line, through the air waves, the cellular cables or on my front door step, I wanted to hover nearby. I am pretty sure as a group that many of us haven’t slept much since Kyle’s death. Every once in a while I’ll make myself visible on Facebook just to see who is up at 1am or 2am with me. I secretly hope it’s no one, and that you’re all getting wonderful sleep and then I secretly hope it’s someone—evidence of life, or lack of death.
In the two and a half months that have followed, you’ve managed to pull together impressively. Challenging as it was, you put your noses to the grindstones, you worked on projects, you took notes, you wrote personal statements, you pulled off a major research paper and you pulled each other, and me, up off that kitchen floor. You honor your sadness by sending me late night messages that simply say, “I miss him”, you honor Kyle by telling a story, remembering a quirk of his, and allowing him to stay so present in our classroom, and most of all you keep Kyle alive by being such good friends to each other, by accepting one another’s flaws, repairing friendships that needed it, and by motivating kids who look like they’re slipping. And in many ways, we’ve only just begun.
Our journey together, if things go as planned, is far from over. In a few short months you’ll be back in this room as CAS Seniors. There will be Power Point, you tube, Howard Zinn, and pre-prom lectures to come. You will be preparing college applications, Senior trips, and lasts of everything for now. Kyle’s spirit will follow us around as well. His desk will be back in this room, his voice through your voice will ring through again, and you will feel his absence as we make transition after transition to prepare you for the next stage in your lives. I urge you to be brave as you have been thus far. Go into this summer dreaming big about the possibilities, stretching your arms wide and wrapping them around a new direction. But don’t be afraid to feel sad, hopeless, and scared. Don’t be afraid to feel too far away, to feel like you’re going to forget, or to access the many complicated layers now formed inside. All of it is real and all of it is yours.
Thank you for a remarkable, overwhelming, triumphant, disastrous, heartbreaking, enlightening, cataclysmic year.
I love you.
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