Like any morning of my freshman year I stumbled into the classroom late, but this day I see faces like a funeral, air like a burial, like a wake as I sit down. My teacher speaking somewhat gravely but still confident and calm,
“I’ve prepared something to prepare you.”
I didn’t understand, but as he started to read the grey journal entries, it was 1958:

March 9:
The cancer is furious but our son is resilient, only eight and he struggles so steadily, so securely. We have faith we will get through this no matter the end.

June 10:
Treatment is violent; radiation and chemicals disintegrate his strength but he keeps on smiling.

September 26:
I can see a dullness in his eyes; a suffering in mine.

November 18:
Keren’s appetite has improved, but it’s still so hard to see him in that scarecrow frame.

December 23:
I pray to God he will improve. I cannot lose faith, but seeing him so weak cripples me.

January 19:
Keren has mended, we’ve been playing in the yard. He can run again. Such happiness in the little things, we thank God every day.

**********

My teacher pauses, breathes.

My heart sinks.

**********

March 5:
Remission has ended. Spirits are lower than his blood counts.

God help him please.

Please.

April 16:
He feels tired all the time.

May 10:
He’s getting worse.

May 23:
At the hospital again. It feels like home when we’re here.

June 19:
I begged God to take me, just take me, don’t take him. Don’t take my child, I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Take me. Take me.

June 25:
We buried our son today.

**********

My teacher clears his throat.

“This is her last entry.”

**********

June 25, 1969:
It’s been ten years since we buried our son. Although his death was ugly, I cannot let myself blame God. I cannot drift away. Bountiful grace has restored him in a new body, a new life with God. I know he is watching us. I know he is there.

**********

Tears catch in my throat, creating a burning lump of emotions I cannot speak of. I will never understand.
My teacher begins his speech; part eulogy, part poem, part exaltation song:
Death is an unavoidable entity. It’s like the ending of a war, or the beginning of puberty; an explosive event of emotions and confusion, causing that of tragedy; of depravity. You cannot escape it, and when it happens to you, you will feel its emptiness consume you. You’ll be standing in a dark, dank room filled with weeping and regrets, and you won’t know what to do staring down at your dead great-grandfather as your hands shake and your throat closes. You will suffer the soullessness of it.
There is no real way to accept it. They say it takes time, and yes, over time you will feel better, but it will never leave you. It will hover over you not as a dark cloud, but as an infinite loop of remembering and forgetting.
There will be days where you remember, where you’re torn from the inside pit of your stomach, up into your heart years later to where you’re a million bits of what used to be a person, laying on the floor roaring at God to bring them back--just bring them back. But there will also be blissful days of the absence of thought, to where you forget they’re gone; you forget that you can no longer call them, no longer hear their voice or their stories of when they took their mom’s mustang out to the drive in without permission and nearly crashed.
But when you are much older, you will remember, and you will only shed a few tears, wishing you had done more. You will wish you had listened, wish you had done more for them, been more for them.
So I am telling you now, live. Live as if life is unsure for everyone, because it is. Appreciate everything, everyone. Smile more, do more, BE more.

**********

It wasn’t until years after I remembered the date of that lecture. And it wasn’t until years later that I went back to my teacher, old and frail as he was, and asked him why. Why would he teach us about life in an English class full of freshman who knew nothing of it, who probably wouldn’t even understand or care about the woman or her child’s death. Why speak of God when we aren’t allowed to teach religion in public schools. Why?
His answer was simple,

“Why, my dear, are you here?”

My breath caught in my throat, the same burning lump of emotion that had caught in it nine years ago.

I understood.