Death of a Colleague

Today a teacher at my school died. A couple of weeks from retirement--after 25 or 30 years of teaching--he had a mild heart attack. He was expected to recover. He passed away quietly sitting in his back yard.

He was not a good teacher. I would have to say, objectively, he was a bad teacher, one who did not teach his students the skills they needed to succeed at the next level of education.

Just this morning, our department was planning, half-heartedly, some "nice" things to do for him at the end-of-the-year faculty luncheon. Although he was not planning to return to school, he would return for the luncheon; he was the type of man who needed that sense of closure, or more to the point, to hear nice things said about him.

Today, people were talking about having a memorial for him on campus somewhere. I understand, I think. A comrade has fallen. It's true; no matter what you think of how he measured up as a teacher or what kind of man he was, the fact remains that he was one of us. And death quakes the living. Some need a way to fight back, I suppose, and so they reach for flowers and memorials and each other. A memorial would be fine--but honestly it would not be a testomonial to the man or the teacher. "He was a nice guy but a horrible teacher." I doubt anybody will profane the dead in this way. Thus, this monument will be for the living, a premptive strike against our own deaths. One teacher reacted to his death by saying, "We are going to fucking die here." Yes, we will. He was talking about this high school, but widen the scope and it's still true. We're all going to die here, there or wherever. And so we will build a memorial to the nice man who had a hard life and wasted the time of many of his students because we are all going to die and now one more of us is dead and what else is there to do?

I'll leave you (the two people reading this) with a poem by Stephen Dunn which seems appropriate.


On the Death of a Colleague

She taught theater, so we gathered 
in the theater.
We praised her voice, her knowledge,
how good she was
with Godot and just four months later
with Gigi.
She was fifty.  The problem in the liver.
Each of us recalled
an incident in which she'd been kind
or witty.
I told how she'd placed her hand
where the failure was,
taught me to speak from my diaphragm.
I was on stage
and heard myself wishing to be impressive.
Someone else spoke
of her cats and no one spoke
of her face
or the last few parties.
The fact was
I had avoided her for months.
It was a student's turn to speak, a sophomore,
one of her actors.
She was a drunk, he said, often came to class
reeking.


Sometimes he couldn't look at her, the blotches,
the awful puffiness.
And yet she was a great teacher,
he loved her,
but thought someone should say
what everyone knew
because she didn't die by accident.


Everyone was crying.  Everyone was crying and it
was almost over now.
The remaining speaker, an historian, said he'd cut
his speech short.
And the Chairman stood up as if by habit,
said something about loss
and thanked us for coming.  None of us moved
except some students-
to the student who'd spoken, and then others
moved to him, across dividers,
down aisles, to his side of the stage.