Dear Grieving Teacher,
If you’ve ever had a student pass away, you know a unique form of grief, which is why I don’t need to tell you about the agonizing pit in a teacher’s stomach when she thinks about the work she collected from him, his seat in class, or the conversations she had with him that nobody else did.
There’s a thousand things she could name about him that she will miss: his crooked smile, the way he held the door for her every morning, or the friend he was to everyone, but all these phrases feel generic at best. He was so much more than what she has the ability to express in words. Still, she tries. Each attempt is an exercise in futility, like a toddler attempting to lift a truck.
No matter how hard she tries her words won’t work, so she folds up her feelings and tucks them neatly in her heart. One day when she is stronger, more prepared to cope, she’ll unfurl each one like a scroll. When she does, she’ll remember all the little details that are too raw to recall right now.
They don’t offer professional development courses for how to handle losing a student. If they did, maybe they could include topics like:
What to say to the classmates left behind
How to resume life
How to avoid blaming yourself
How to continue investing when you could be so deeply hurt again
But the truth is teachers don't need to take a course on grieving because grief is only a mirror for the amount of love two people shared, and teachers don’t have to learn how to love.
For a teacher, loving is as natural as breathing. It’s what she does. It’s who she is.
Because of that, she’ll keep investing year after year despite the gut-wrenching agony from her loss.
And yes, on any given day, her heart could split right in two again, but the alternative is she could work in a profession where it never does.
How blessed are we to have been called to a profession that can cause such hurt and pain, while simultaneously fostering utter gratitude from the sheer privilege of knowing him?
-CDB