Over my twenty-year career as a teacher, five of my former students have died young, from various causes. The most recent was last May, when a former student committed suicide at the end of her ninth grade year. This post attempts to describe the experience of losing a student. I am working on future posts about the role of social media in school-based tragedies and ways to involve students and the community in remembrances. These have been difficult to write, one of the reasons for my relatively long hiatus from posting.
Part 1
I touch the future.
I teach.
— Christa McAuliffe
Perhaps it is appropriate that Christa McAuliffe’s words reverberate in my mind as I try to make sense of the grief of losing a student. After the death of any young person, those that knew and loved them grieve not just the person lost, but the experiences and growth we had imagined were ahead of them.
Because learning is so deeply tied into the future, teachers experience a unique kind of grief.
I dwell in possibility.
— Emily Dickinson
As I try to make sense of my grief, this Emily Dickinson line keeps coming back to me. The future is embedded in the present. Dwell is such a grounded, sedentary word, and possibility so fluid.
It is bleak and utilitarian to view education solely as preparation for future academic and professional work. Let us rather dwell in possibility, and invite our students to dwell there, too. When we lose a student, we lose possibilities. If we expand our students’ sense of possibility while they are with us, we enrich their present.
Possibility is a source of both pain and comfort. A life cut short leaves myriad possibilities unrealized. Yet I smile when I remember students’ dreams and goals, times when they learned something new, when they first encountered a new possibility.
Get in touch with a former teacher who helped you dwell in possibility. My high school English teacher and I just spent an afternoon together at an art museum. In an earlier post, I wrote about a student of my father’s who got in touch with him after forty years. These are win-win interactions, deeply fulfilling to both teacher and student.
OK, this one is literally my guru. Not to go all Oprah on you, but the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s writing has been the most comfort to me in times of grief. I first discovered her philosophy after my mother died in 2009, and she has been my go-to ever since when I am experiencing uncertainty or pain. The gist of it is that you can’t go around your feelings, you have to go through them, and that we can use our emotions to develop our compassion for and connection to other people.
In Any Case... 
I’m sorry for the loss of those young lives, and the loss of possibilities. I appreciate your call to “dwell in possibilities”. That certainly reflects the potential that lies within all. I hope many people steal your idea to contact a teacher and express their appreciation, before the opportunity is no long available. Take care of you.
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Your insight about the role that an orientation toward possibilities plays in both our grief and our our abilities to comfort ourselves and one another is so helpful to all of us–and your timing in sharing this couldn’t be better for me personally. Having seen you recently and thus having known that you were thinking much about your students who’d died much too young, I am so glad for you and for us that you’re now able to write about them. Looking forward to your next posts. Thank you, Emily!
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Something that I have been thinking about recently is the idea of establishing boundaries between myself and the social and emotional needs of my students. When incidents such as this come up grief can make it challenging and impossible to establish and maintain these boundaries. Due to that, I was struck by your article and mentioning of the special kind of grief teachers can feel. I have recently been in situations where young people I know are struggling with mental health issues and could not name the grief that I was feeling. The idea of dwelling in possibility is one that resinates with me and my deep desire to have students see the possibility that they hold.
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