Death School Stories

This one is going to be hard to write.
In the course of teaching school, students die.  Most of them don't die during the school year, but some do.  It's heart wrenching.

In all of my years of teaching, only one--ONE--student passed away of natural causes during the school year.  Already wrote about Shelby who passed of leukemia after a long fight.

Several died as a result of vehicle accidents.  One such accident took two of our kids at once, and put a third in serious condition.  These were good kids.  Honors classes.  Band members.  Good families.  Not daredevils.  On this particular day, two boys were taking a friend out for food on his birthday.  It had rained.  The country roads were slick with fallen leaves.  Just over a hill--or so I understand it--a car was pulling out of a driveway on a blacktop road in front of the boys' car.  Brakes were applied; the car skidded and hit a tree right next to the roadway.  The car caught on fire.  The end.

Except--a man who lived on the road near the accident was trying his best to get the boys out of the car.  The driver seemed to be DOA; one other passenger was pulled out with major leg injuries.  The third boy was trapped as the car burned.  The man couldn't get him out..and the first responders couldn't get there in time to save him, but not before his screams for help were heard.  We lost two students that awful October day.  Both were in my Honors English class of Sophomores.  The next day, there were two empty desks in my honors class.  There were also counselors in the Media Center to help kids cope.  On my prep period, I went to the Media Center to seek solace for myself.  Found a fireman who had been at the accident site.  I told him that I would feel a whole lot better if I knew that the boys didn't suffer.  He assured me that the end was quick....but there was still that poor man trying to extricate the boys.  I'm sure he still has PTSD over that.  I went to the boys' funeral.  Not my happiest moment as a teacher.  And then I had to go face the class, noting that my big boys were coming down the hall with tears streaming down their faces.  It crushed me.

I should probably note, although it hurts me to do it, that the young man who drove the car on that fateful day confided in me mere days before the accident that he had just earned his car keys back from his grandparents with whom he lived.  A newly-licensed driver, he got in trouble with the law for vandalizing mailboxes on a joy-ride, or some such nonsense.  Grandpa grounded him from the car for a month.  My only comment to him was something like, "That's exactly the kind of behavior that will keep you out of National Honor Society.  Do you know that?"  He looked surprised and admitted that he didn't...but then he earned the car keys back..and the rest is sad history.   

Another nasty accident happened that killed another of my former students.  He was a big boy--a gentle giant.  He was the passenger in a car that crashed, and he was the only one who died.  He had already graduated.  Had his whole life ahead of him.  Broke my heart.

There were other vehicle accidents, of course.  Kids in cars, but I was retired when many of them happened.  All I could do was ache for their families.
The hits don't quit coming, though.  When I had seniors, I had a young lady named Ashton.  She was active in golf--a totally delightful young lady.  Pretty.  Smart.  Charming.  To celebrate her 18th birthday over the summer, her grandmother took her and and one of her younger sisters to a golf outing in Florida with Grandma's pilot-boyfriend at the stick of his small plane.  On the way back, they left in thunderstorm conditions.  The pilot took the plane up over 10,000 feet to avoid the storm, and the plane broke apart.  All of their bodies were found on the ground somewhere in Georgia, and I was horrified.  When school started, some of the ceiling tiles in my classroom had been painted by Ashton (something we allowed in those days but no more, for fire reasons).  I asked the admin to remove the tiles and send them to Ashton's parents.  I really just didn't want to see them every day.

And then there were drug deaths.  These didn't happen during school time, but they happened, nonetheless.  I can't even keep up.  Dozens that I know about.  Probably many more that I don't know about.  Some were anticipated by families and friends, but some were total shocks.

The worst jars to my sensibilities were the suicides.
So many young people just giving up on life.   I'm pretty sure that some gender issues were in there, but so were brush-ups with the law.  Only one of these happened during school time, although I'm fairly certain that school issues sealed some resolves to do away with themselves.  We'll never know.  I attended some funerals.  It was just too sad to attend many.
One such suicide situation had nothing to do with a student or former student, except that I had a young lady whose boyfriend shot himself in the head right in front of her during an argument.  She was absent for a while.  Had PTSD and trying desperately to maintain her sanity in spite of what she had seen and experienced.  I really, really felt for her.  No one should ever have to endure that...

It isn't natural for parents or teachers to bury their kids, but sometimes your heart has to break.  Just another day in education paradise.