Heart weight

I have a dear, tender-hearted student who is grieving the freakish death of another student to whom he was related. I’m not sure what their relationship was like, but I don’t get the sense that they were close. She died when he was on a trip to the Middle East in December. For him it was a dream come true to travel to Palestine alone and conduct interviews for his political science theses. Now he’s tormented by guilt that he wasn’t with his family when his cousin died.

When he returned to campus, I asked him if he knew the student who died; I was shocked to find out she was his cousin. As he sat before me, I saw him struggle to talk about her death and his absence. I told him that when you live your life and follow your path to strange lands separate from your family, you will miss things—important things. But that doesn’t ever make it the wrong choice to follow your heart’s desire away from the life you once knew. I told him that the only way to honor his cousin’s life—the life now gone forever and far too soon—is to continue to live his life the way he must, by using his gifts and pushing the boundaries of what he can do with them. She can’t do that anymore, and there’s absolutely no making sense of that. But he can make sense of his own life with the time and the talent that he’s got.

Then I gave him an assignment: write an essay about it. He told a wonderful story about how he was sitting in some great Cathedral in Jerusalem after he received the news that she had died. He didn’t pray; he isn’t Catholic, and it was too late to pray, as far as he was concerned. But a priest appeared, sat down beside him and asked if he was all right. And then he casually confessed—his guilt and his grief.

So, he wrote it down, just like I asked him to. I read his essay last night. What I read was something much more beautiful and profound than I had ever seen this kid do. He wrote in a way and from a place I didn’t know he could. And he wrote it for me. I was the only “authority figure” in his life who had asked him how he was, who knew what was going on inside of him. He knew that if I witnessed his vulnerability, I would not judge him. And this allowed him to go to his depths and write his truth.

This has changed him. And it has changed me. Never before have I gone through such an intimate process with a writing student of mine. I am honored. And I feel the weight of it.

And it's not over. This kid is suffering, with guilt and with grief. He's facing down his mortality for the first time. That's something I happen to know a little something about.

More and more, teaching feels like the right thing for me to be doing. . . .