Monday, February 20, 2023

Coping with Loss and Grief

 Grief, says my aunt Fran, is a tricky thing.

Sarah, a work friend of mine, died last week.  We don't know why.  She was young, early 30s, and pregnant with her second child.  She was the school psychologist for my elementary school, though she kept her door wide open to both staff and students.  She was a shining light and a force for positivity in a place where it is easy to become jaded and cynical.

I was hit hard by this.  I didn't know her well, though we were on friendly terms and chatted whenever we ran into each other.  She was there when I had a panic attack at school, coming down with the school nurse to sit with me until I felt more together and my husband arrived to pick me up.  She even picked me up and drove me to school the next day, as I had to leave my car at the building.

At first, I felt shocked... Sarah was younger than me, healthier than me.  How could this be?  Then, the sadness... the loss of two lives, one entirely unlived (and tangentially it strikes me how subjective the whole abortion debate is... when Sarah died and her son with her, it's the death of an unborn child.  When a woman who doesn't feel like having a child wants to dispose of an unwanted pregnancy, it's not... even if said unborn child were the same age as Sarah's son.)

The guilt followed soon after.  I have a very loud and very nasty critical inner voice, and it began hammering at me... You barely knew her.  You weren't REALLY friends.  You don't have any business pretending that you feel loss.  How can you honestly feel sad?  You're a fake, a poser, an imposter, and people will know and then what will they think of you?

I rebelled against this, of course.  I got angry.  Grief is grief.  You feel what you feel.  I discussed it with the school-provided grief counselors, with my own counselor, with my aunt, who teaches grief classes.  All of them agreed that I was right, and pointed out that if a friend were to say the same things to me, I'd tell them to fight it, that they had every right to grieve, that what they felt was justified and perfectly okay.

The critical inner voice doubled down.  You horrible person... you're making this about YOU, not HER.  How dare you?

And I froze.  I couldn't help wondering if the voice was right... was I making this loss about me, not about Sarah?  If I was, how could I refocus on the truly important epicenter of these feelings?  The fact is, two lives were unexpectedly ended far too soon... and there's a hole in many, many lives now as a result.  

Sarah was the epitome of a good person.  She cared deeply and honestly about the students she served, the district she worked for, the colleagues she worked among.  She was selfless and giving... everything a school counselor should be.  She tried her best to make the school a better place to be, for everyone within its walls.  She touched a countless number of lives, some deeply and intimately, some with a feather-light brush.  I was one of those light brushes... and I'm deeply grateful to have known Sarah, even briefly and at a coworker's distance.

In the end, I think, what I need to do is ask myself, how did knowing Sarah make your life different?  How can you continue on in a way that honors that change?

Those are questions I'm still pondering.

Friday, January 6, 2023

Sick

 There's something about being sick that reaches beyond the physically unpleasant... the fatigue, the aches, the coughing.  There's something that extends into the emotions, especially if you've been sick for a while... a sense of not-rightness that extends to the bones, hovering about you, akin somehow to paranoia.  It's a shadow hanging over you, a feeling that something is looming, unseen... an intimation of great threat.

At least, that's how it is for me.

For a week now I've battled a cough that has settled into me, drawing chest muscles tight, rattling up from my lungs, and an accompanying aching soreness in my throat.  No fever, no nausea, minor congestion... "just a cold."  It's not a chronic illness, not anything that would hospitalize you, not even akin to Covid.  It's just bad enough to keep me up most of the night hacking and wheezing, preventing any semblance of sound sleep - but not bad enough to justify calling in sick to work for four days in a row (which I did anyway).

Given my high blood pressure, I can't take 95% of the over the counter medicines available, and I've gotten quite resentful of the stupid commercials which show people with colds and flus popping pills or guzzling syrups and going happily on about their lives, free from all symptoms.  It hasn't worked that way for me, not with the few medicines said to be acceptable for people with high blood pressure.  

Commercials minimize cold and flu viruses as minor inconveniences, things easily put off by any sensible person with a life to live - but as a teacher, I guarantee that if you aren't able to sleep through the night because you're wracked with coughing, going into work with a cold is far more than merely inconvenient.  Besides the physical issues, you have the fact that kids can smell weakness - you'd do better to wade through piranha-infested waters with a bleeding gash in your leg than try to teach grammar with a cold.  At least the meat-eating fish might leave a bit of you intact to clamber out the other side.

Actually, I'm exaggerating mightily.  My own students are mostly a kindly lot, and would likely opt not to run rampant... but they also wouldn't accomplish much, not with a muzzy-headed teacher who can't speak more than half a dozen words before dissolving into a coughing fit.  

And then there's the looks you get from other teachers... the looks that say, Why are you even here if you're sick?  Never mind that you feel guilty calling in for "just a cold;" never mind that calling in sick to teach is more work than actually showing up, because you have to make up lessons that keep the students busy enough not to eat the substitute alive (and that's not an exaggeration, kindly students or not) while trying not to make the lessons too difficult for someone who isn't an actual teacher to teach.  

Or not teach.  It's a sad fact that most substitutes cannot do any real teaching that will help you keep up with your curriculum.  It's not their fault.  Curriculum lessons are designed to be delivered by people who are there every day, who have a working knowledge of the students' strengths and weaknesses, who can adapt and adjust and see the Big Picture.  Curriculum lessons layer one atop the other, and if you don't know what was taught prior to a particular lesson, you're hopelessly adrift.  Substitutes who are aiming to become teachers themselves give every lesson left for them their most valiant try... but they haven't got the full curriculum guide to fall back on, nor do they have the time to learn all that came before.  

And not all who substitute are hoping to be full time teachers.  There was one lovely lady who subbed in my district for many years who routinely ignored any lessons left for students, preferring instead to engage the kids in long, detailed conversations about her cats.  We shuddered when she appeared on the morning memo as a substitute... for the teacher whose classroom she covered, that was a lost day.  Others think that they can "improve on" the lessons left for them, and it takes the better part of two days to unravel the leavings.

But I couldn't face teaching this week, not feeling the way I did.  So I called in, and felt miserable for it.  And finally, I did get a diagnosis... after two sets of doctors and one chest x-ray, it wasn't "just a cold" after all.  It was bronchitis.  And so here I am, feeling deeply uncomfortable and uneasy, wondering about the state of my classroom, and hoping that by Monday I'll have healed up enough to manage to drag myself into work.  

I hate being sick.

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

A Post of 5s, 2023

 What I'm Reading:  Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse by Maya Phillips

What I'm Writing:  A book about the care and keeping of pet leopard geckos for kids and parents to read together.

What I'm Watching:  The Ugliest House in America (HGTV)

What I'm Listening To: His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik (again), and The Shift: 7 Powerful Mindset Changes for Lasting Weight Loss by Dr. Gary Foster

And I can't for the life of me think of what #5 is supposed to be.  I'll need to check.