What's left behind

We are losing a student this month. I taught him for exactly two weeks. A tiny, underdeveloped freshman, he is currently being shredded by leukemia. His father has been shipped back from Iraq to say goodbye, and today we wrote letters to let him know that he is being missed in fourth block. He went on hospice care last week. It is accepted that he probably won’t make it to Thanksgiving. My students looked at me for direction as to what you say to a fourteen-year old who knows that he will most likely die before his next birthday. I told them to try to be entertaining. Tell him stories where you exaggerate the hideous aspects of the cafeteria food, or how if you don’t make it down to the end of the hall before the bell rings for passing period, you might not make it through the massive swell of bodies. They did well, but I find myself struggling through my own letter to him. I can’t say goodbye to a child whose relationship to me is limited. I’m just not sure how to pull my big girl panties up on this one and come out on the dignified adult side of things. How do you accept the fact that life is ending for a fourteen-year old kid?

My brother made it to16 before he left us. He had muscular dystrophy, so like Ryan, we had time to accept the fact that he would never grow into adulthood. My brother was the type of boy in high school that I roll my eyes at now. He had a friend named Benny who had extremely large breasts. She used to walk behind his wheelchair in the halls and he would slam on his brakes so that her breasts would bump into the back of his head. I can remember that for his 15th birthday, his asked for and received a Playboy magazine. All of us are convinced that had he lived a normal life, my brother would have been the boy to knock a girl up in high school. He would have married young, avoided college, and probably divorced just as young, being a bit immature emotionally. Internet porn came way too late as far as my brother was concerned. My ex-husband was appalled when my family and I laughed about the way my brother used to be. He said it flew in the face of what I tolerated as a female. What he didn’t understand was that had my brother lived, my sister and I, devoted feminists, would have been relentless in our efforts to enlighten him. But at 16, his womanizing ways were one of the less painful memories that he left behind.

When someone goes who has been sick, you try to forget the memories that involve hospital beds, tubes, and rail thin arms and legs that wouldn’t straighten all the way from years of being in a wheel chair. You remember instead the goofy things he used to do, like conducting his own Pepsi challenge for the neighborhood kids, or talking you into dragging him down the hall one Christmas morning so that he could see the tree before the rest of the family woke up, unaware that his pajama bottoms were sliding off of him and he would get a case of rug burn that would keep him out of pants for weeks. The times in his life when he was as absolutely normal as it was possible for him to be.

What we do, those of us who work through a loss, is cling to the parts of them that are left behind in us. I have stated before that I am a dork. Completely. This comes from my brother. All the things that he could not do because of the limits his body placed on him, I would do for him. I was an accomplished slapstick comedian by the age of ten because falling on the ground or smacking my face into the cupboards was a sure-fire way to make him laugh. It stuck, and now when I fall off my daughter’s bed and thump hard enough on the floor to make the house shake, I am reminded of my brother, her uncle, who, despite his rather lopsided view of women, was a man I would have been proud for her to know.

Across town today, there is a family huddled around a bed where a child fights through the last days of his life. Long after he is gone, they will sit around the table at holidays and recount their favorite memories of him. They will gloss over his rough spots and focus on the parts of him that were miraculous. A part of them will forever want to weep at the mention of his name, and some of the best events in life will be bittersweet because of his absence. How on earth do you write a letter and leave out all of that?