So don’t say you weren’t warned.
This week my family went to Tennessee for my husband’s grandmother’s funeral. She was a lovely person, and though I didn’t know her well and had only seen her a few times, she was well loved and will be greatly missed. Going to her funeral reminded me of my own great-grandfather’s funeral. I was only a little older than my daughter Maggie is now, and I remember feeling distinctly rotten because I was not sadder. I felt that I should be crying as all the people around me seemed to be, but I hardly knew my great-grandfather. I have one really good, warm memory of him. He used to whittle the neatest little things out of peach pits, walnut shells, pecan shells, and bits of wood. He made these tiny little owls perching on branches and little baskets. Out the side door on his farm was a tree with a knothole in it. He told me to follow him outside: he wanted to show me something. He pointed inside the knothole and there was a tiny owl he had made. I couldn’t have been older than eight, and I was so excited to be receiving personal attention from my great-grandfather and so impressed by the little owl. But I didn’t cry at his funeral. I got the feeling Maggie felt like she should be more sad than she was about her own great-grandmother’s passing and that she, like I did when my great-grandfather passed, felt bad about her inability to grieve. She looked down at her feet and said, “This is a sad moment,” as if asking me if she were supposed to be sad. I told her what I wish someone had thought to tell me: “Some of the people here are very sad because they loved Granny very much.”
On our way home, my husband took me by his grandparents’ old homestead. We were in the country proper and turned up a gravel drive so steep and narrow we would only be able to back out rather than turn around when it came time to leave. The maple trees he describes surrounding the house are all there, but the house itself is gone. It looked like no house had ever even been there. Can you imagine? You live in a house for decades, sharing laughter and tears and love, and it can just disappear with no indication it was ever even there.
We don’t have long, do we? And even if we are good teachers and parents (and grandparents), within about 50 years of our deaths, the folks that loved us will pass on, and those that remain won’t know who we were or remember us. As much as I would like to think that’s not true, it is at least more true than it is not.
Maybe it’s because sometimes I feel underappreciated (if you go into teaching thinking you’ll be appreciated regularly, please let me disabuse you of that notion—you will get the occasional kind message of thanks from students and parents). Maybe I’m frustrated with some aspects of this school year. I did juggle grad school, a new position, and family, and not too well, I might add. I don’t know exactly why, but I’m feeling right now like much of what I do will be so fleetingly remembered.
So I don’t have any grand solution or poetic thoughts, except maybe this lesson from Mr. Keating:
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