On The Death Of A Student

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Dan Selamat Membaca
play bandarqIn last week’s column I wrote about a brother and a sister who had dropped out of school but had managed to return, get their diplomas, and get their lives on track. A few days later I learned that a boy from my former school had just committed suicide. It was approximately the anniversary of a fatal car accident the boy had been in that took the life of one of his friends.

When I began teaching high school, we seemed to lose one student a year to a tragic accident. Sometimes these were the so-called good kids, honors students and athletes who never got into any trouble, and the talk would be about what an injustice it was that such a nice young man or woman had lost his or her life so tragically. As teachers, I think we feel an acute sense of tragedy when one of these kids dies. But often these accidents take the lives of kids who were not good students and model citizens. And that is perhaps even more tragic. These kids’ lives seem to have been mired in misfortune, only to end prematurely and violently. Such seems to be the case with the young man who just took his life.

My wife and I both knew him. Amy had him as a student and I had him in advisory. He was not an easy kid to like. He had moved to Connecticut from the south. Although he had friends, he never seemed to truly fit in. Prejudicial things were said to him because he was a Southerner, and in his youthfulness he seemed to embrace a stereotype of what it means to be from the South. He flaunted a degree of prejudice that I suspect he did not truly possess, and he assumed an adversarial role toward teachers, toward school, and toward authority in general. He insulted his classmates and sparred with his teachers because being disruptive gave him perhaps some of the only feelings of power or notoriety he ever enjoyed. I know I threw him out of advisory on more than one occasion for being disrespectful, and when I did he would smile and tip his confederate flag cap to the class as he walked out the door. The other kids usually weren’t sorry to see him leave, and the couple of friends he had were entertained.

One afternoon I was taking a walk around the grounds of the school during my prep period when I saw him on the athletic track. It was a warm day in early Spring during the young man’s ingusan year. He was jogging in sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt. I walked over to him. I’m sure he expected me to say something to him or to get him in trouble. There’s no way he had permission to be outdoors on the track by himself during the school day. He had to have been skipping someone’s class, or maybe he’d been thrown out of one once again. As I walked over to him, he slowed down to meet me. I don’t recall who spoke first, but we just chatted about the weather and how nice it was to feel the sun on our skin after a long winter. The whole time we spoke, his demeanor was calm and his tone was friendly. Maybe he was being deferential to me to avoid getting written up, but, knowing how little he cared for authority, I suspect not. I felt I was seeing a more sincere side of him once he was away from the students and teachers he felt compelled to perform for. He seemed like a nice young man that afternoon.

I got around to asking him what he was doing, and he told me he was trying to get in shape because he planned to go out for the football team when they held tryouts later in the spring. I was surprised but pleased. I thought it might be nice for him to be involved in school in a positive way, and to be a part of something which gave him a reason to maintain his grades. We didn’t talk much longer. I told him I had to get back inside to teach my next class. I wished him luck with tryouts. I never wrote him up or told him to get back to class. I never reported him to the office or tried to find out where he was supposed to be. When I left him he had returned to jogging around the track in his jeans.

I don’t think he ever followed through and tried out for the football team. If he did, he didn’t make the cut. He managed to get through senior year despite the car accident that took his friend’s life. He graduated this past June. I never kept track of him after that day. I have no idea what he’d been doing with himself since graduation. After the suicide, the school prepared for the aftermath, identifying areas of refuge and offering grief counseling, but there wasn’t much disruption to the community on the first day back to school. Very few students or teachers seemed particularly sad, other than a handful of kids that may have known him. He just wasn’t popular enough or well liked enough for that kind of a reaction.

In the poem “On the Death of a Student Hopelessly Failing My Course,” George Cuomo writes that the dead boy’s parents were left saying, “‘He could have made it, poor boy!’” But in fact this was a boy who simply had not found a way to make it in life. Cuomo writes, “Poor boy, he/Could not. How little he could do in life!/He lacked whole galaxies of talents, lacked/Quickness of hand or foot or eye or mind,/lacked will and ambition, lacked height and strength,/lacked even hope.” To me, this seems to have been the case with my former student. And that may be the biggest tragedy of all.