Where are the footprints that danced on the beaches,
And hands that cast wishes that sunk like a stone?
(“Song to a Seagull”, Joni Mitchell)
I can’t believe this is happening.
We just got in yesterday afternoon from skiing, when Karen from school called to say that they’d found Amanda’s body in a ditch near Barrie, Ontario. She’d been beaten and left there on the side of the road.
I’ve been up most of the night picturing her tiny shoulders heaving as she sat crying in the washroom last week, feeling her head resting on my shoulder as I patted her back so hesitantly: as teachers we're always so careful these days in how we express caring and sympathy. All night my arms ached to enfold her and surround her with whatever protection I could offer.
How will we ever get through this day at school?
JOURNAL: Tuesday, March 19th
I can’t stop sighing; it’s as if no matter how much air I take into my lungs, it’s never enough.
This morning I was stopped at a traffic light when I heard the driver of the car behind me leaning on his horn to urge me on. I’d been staring at the mailbox on the sidewalk, not really thinking about anything, just staring. I have to keep shaking my head, and sighing, to bring myself back to reality. I seem to shiver when I sigh.
___________________________________
The grief counselors are in the school for this whole week, to work with the classes and any individuals who want to talk. They’ve set up a quiet room where kids can go, one or two at a time, to write a note to Amanda or her family, or to meet with one of the counselors. It’s nice in the quiet room.
Not having my own classroom to care for, I spent most of the day patrolling the halls and bathrooms, shepherding stray kids to the quiet room. The counselors had laid out colourful paper and markers for the kids to write their notes. There was a lot of hugging going on there; the counselors have more freedom for that kind of thing than we do.
Yesterday some of the parents came to pick up their kids from school as the news filtered through the community; I guess they just needed to believe that their kids would be safe if they were kept closer to home. Some of those kids didn’t come back to school today either.
__________________________________
I saw Jean today and for the first time since we’ve been meeting, I had little to say.
I brought her the letters that I wrote during Spring Break but I couldn’t bring myself to speak of Claire or of anything that mattered. The lost and lonely twelve year old inside me, who walked away from the farm on Saltspring Island all those years ago, is walking the halls of the school every bit as dazed and bewildered as all the other kids around me.
I still can’t believe that it’s true. I keep thinking that it’s like a bad script from some melodramatic “Movie of the Week”. It’s the ultimate exaggerated scenario that you would use in street proofing teens – only it’s too extreme, they wouldn’t believe that it could ever happen to one of them.
But it did. The police have pieced together parts of the story – essentially that Amanda had left home last Tuesday after a fight with her mother, and headed out hitchhiking to Guelph to be with her father.
Who hitchhikes anymore? In this age of cell phones I can’t imagine that someone wouldn’t have notified the police at the sight of this little waif hitchhiking on the side of the highway. How could it have happened?
JOURNAL: Wednesday, March 20th
We’re all learning to grieve from each other. Some cry and others can’t let themselves cry until they see the others letting go. Some write in their journals, some have to talk about it, others just listen.
I was thinking today about one little girl that I sat with on Monday. She was standing in the hallway just outside the quiet room. I asked her if she’d like to go in and write a little message, or just talk to someone. Immediately she backed away from me, shaking her head insistently. “No,” she said, “I can’t go in there.”
I tried to reassure her, to tell her that I’d let her teacher know where she was. She just kept shaking her head, her small hands clinging to her upper arms as she held herself, stealing glances into the quiet room through her long bangs. “I can’t go in there,” she kept insisting, yet neither did she make any move to leave.
I got us a couple of chairs from the library and we sat in the hallway across from the open door to the quiet room. After just a few minutes of sitting together she spoke: “My cousin’s dying too,” she said “Of cancer.”
I asked her if she got to see her cousin very much and she said no, that he lived in Calgary. He’s seven years old. We sat for a long time; I watched her as she stared into the room. In her mind, the realization of the finality of death seemed to live in that room where she dared not enter – as if in there, death might claim her too.
________________________________
A strange social interaction seems to have developed among Amanda’s friends. There has grown a hierarchy of levels of grief that the kids seem to think that individuals are entitled to feel, as if there’s a preordained order of those who deserve to feel the most pain and therefore receive the greatest consolation, beginning with her best friend, moving down to good friends and radiating out from there in descending order based on how much time Amanda had spent with each of them. If Amanda hadn’t been the bright and popular girl that she was, I wonder if there would have been as much status in their levels of grief.
No such order exists in adult life; when faced with this kind of soul numbing tragedy no one should have to justify his or her feelings. You never know what memories or fears can come to the surface when thinking of such unbelievable horror.
_________________________________
Suzie and Joni, two of Amanda’s friends, cleared out her locker and her desk this morning. Karen, their teacher, had an appointment before class and asked if I could be with them. I got them a box and we began with her desk, sorting textbooks to return to storage, from workbooks that would go home for her family to deal with.
Joni cried as she turned the pages of Amanda’s sketchbook for art class; there were lots of doodles and rough drawings of many of the kids in the class from their unit on portraits. There was an amazingly realistic charcoal study of Amanda’s own hand (you could tell that it was her hand because of the bangles and friendship bracelets that she had drawn around the wrist). With a shiver that went through my heart with the coldness of steel, I had a mental flash of that hand, bangles tinkling as she clawed at her attacker’s face, pawing and slapping in the air, never quite connecting. Later, the same hand surfaced in my imagination, lying limp in the slush and the mud of the ditch where her body was found. The suddenness and intensity of the images nauseated me and I had to run to the bathroom. I’m so surprised by how strong these physical reactions to sadness can be: the sighing, the leaking eyes, the shivers, and even the nausea come suddenly, and uncontrollably, and yet we have to maintain a strong front for the kids.
JOURNAL: Thursday, March 21st
Haiku
You were the strong one,
I thought I’d see you again.
I guess I was wrong.
(Nola)
Karen had her class write poetry about how they were feeling. She showed me some of them. This one was written by one of Amanda’s closest friends; it struck me for its sense of resignation. Thirteen-year olds shouldn’t have to feel so resigned to life’s precariousness.
(“Song to a Seagull”, Joni Mitchell)
I can’t believe this is happening.
We just got in yesterday afternoon from skiing, when Karen from school called to say that they’d found Amanda’s body in a ditch near Barrie, Ontario. She’d been beaten and left there on the side of the road.
I’ve been up most of the night picturing her tiny shoulders heaving as she sat crying in the washroom last week, feeling her head resting on my shoulder as I patted her back so hesitantly: as teachers we're always so careful these days in how we express caring and sympathy. All night my arms ached to enfold her and surround her with whatever protection I could offer.
How will we ever get through this day at school?
JOURNAL: Tuesday, March 19th
I can’t stop sighing; it’s as if no matter how much air I take into my lungs, it’s never enough.
This morning I was stopped at a traffic light when I heard the driver of the car behind me leaning on his horn to urge me on. I’d been staring at the mailbox on the sidewalk, not really thinking about anything, just staring. I have to keep shaking my head, and sighing, to bring myself back to reality. I seem to shiver when I sigh.
___________________________________
The grief counselors are in the school for this whole week, to work with the classes and any individuals who want to talk. They’ve set up a quiet room where kids can go, one or two at a time, to write a note to Amanda or her family, or to meet with one of the counselors. It’s nice in the quiet room.
Not having my own classroom to care for, I spent most of the day patrolling the halls and bathrooms, shepherding stray kids to the quiet room. The counselors had laid out colourful paper and markers for the kids to write their notes. There was a lot of hugging going on there; the counselors have more freedom for that kind of thing than we do.
Yesterday some of the parents came to pick up their kids from school as the news filtered through the community; I guess they just needed to believe that their kids would be safe if they were kept closer to home. Some of those kids didn’t come back to school today either.
__________________________________
I saw Jean today and for the first time since we’ve been meeting, I had little to say.
I brought her the letters that I wrote during Spring Break but I couldn’t bring myself to speak of Claire or of anything that mattered. The lost and lonely twelve year old inside me, who walked away from the farm on Saltspring Island all those years ago, is walking the halls of the school every bit as dazed and bewildered as all the other kids around me.
I still can’t believe that it’s true. I keep thinking that it’s like a bad script from some melodramatic “Movie of the Week”. It’s the ultimate exaggerated scenario that you would use in street proofing teens – only it’s too extreme, they wouldn’t believe that it could ever happen to one of them.
But it did. The police have pieced together parts of the story – essentially that Amanda had left home last Tuesday after a fight with her mother, and headed out hitchhiking to Guelph to be with her father.
Who hitchhikes anymore? In this age of cell phones I can’t imagine that someone wouldn’t have notified the police at the sight of this little waif hitchhiking on the side of the highway. How could it have happened?
JOURNAL: Wednesday, March 20th
We’re all learning to grieve from each other. Some cry and others can’t let themselves cry until they see the others letting go. Some write in their journals, some have to talk about it, others just listen.
I was thinking today about one little girl that I sat with on Monday. She was standing in the hallway just outside the quiet room. I asked her if she’d like to go in and write a little message, or just talk to someone. Immediately she backed away from me, shaking her head insistently. “No,” she said, “I can’t go in there.”
I tried to reassure her, to tell her that I’d let her teacher know where she was. She just kept shaking her head, her small hands clinging to her upper arms as she held herself, stealing glances into the quiet room through her long bangs. “I can’t go in there,” she kept insisting, yet neither did she make any move to leave.
I got us a couple of chairs from the library and we sat in the hallway across from the open door to the quiet room. After just a few minutes of sitting together she spoke: “My cousin’s dying too,” she said “Of cancer.”
I asked her if she got to see her cousin very much and she said no, that he lived in Calgary. He’s seven years old. We sat for a long time; I watched her as she stared into the room. In her mind, the realization of the finality of death seemed to live in that room where she dared not enter – as if in there, death might claim her too.
________________________________
A strange social interaction seems to have developed among Amanda’s friends. There has grown a hierarchy of levels of grief that the kids seem to think that individuals are entitled to feel, as if there’s a preordained order of those who deserve to feel the most pain and therefore receive the greatest consolation, beginning with her best friend, moving down to good friends and radiating out from there in descending order based on how much time Amanda had spent with each of them. If Amanda hadn’t been the bright and popular girl that she was, I wonder if there would have been as much status in their levels of grief.
No such order exists in adult life; when faced with this kind of soul numbing tragedy no one should have to justify his or her feelings. You never know what memories or fears can come to the surface when thinking of such unbelievable horror.
_________________________________
Suzie and Joni, two of Amanda’s friends, cleared out her locker and her desk this morning. Karen, their teacher, had an appointment before class and asked if I could be with them. I got them a box and we began with her desk, sorting textbooks to return to storage, from workbooks that would go home for her family to deal with.
Joni cried as she turned the pages of Amanda’s sketchbook for art class; there were lots of doodles and rough drawings of many of the kids in the class from their unit on portraits. There was an amazingly realistic charcoal study of Amanda’s own hand (you could tell that it was her hand because of the bangles and friendship bracelets that she had drawn around the wrist). With a shiver that went through my heart with the coldness of steel, I had a mental flash of that hand, bangles tinkling as she clawed at her attacker’s face, pawing and slapping in the air, never quite connecting. Later, the same hand surfaced in my imagination, lying limp in the slush and the mud of the ditch where her body was found. The suddenness and intensity of the images nauseated me and I had to run to the bathroom. I’m so surprised by how strong these physical reactions to sadness can be: the sighing, the leaking eyes, the shivers, and even the nausea come suddenly, and uncontrollably, and yet we have to maintain a strong front for the kids.
JOURNAL: Thursday, March 21st
Haiku
You were the strong one,
I thought I’d see you again.
I guess I was wrong.
(Nola)
Karen had her class write poetry about how they were feeling. She showed me some of them. This one was written by one of Amanda’s closest friends; it struck me for its sense of resignation. Thirteen-year olds shouldn’t have to feel so resigned to life’s precariousness.
JOURNAL: Friday, March 22nd
A bunch of us from school went out for a drink after work today. We all agreed that it’s been a hell of a week, in a hell of a year: two births among the teachers, now two deaths with Tommy and Cory’s father and Amanda. Let’s hope that that’s it for this year.
Earlier in the day, the older kids attended a memorial service for Amanda. The choir, which had been such a big part of her life, sang “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” The principal spoke of the need to continue to support each other and Amanda’s wish that we enjoy life as she did.
One of her friends read a poem that Amanda had given her and Suzie told of the wonderful memories that she had of when Amanda went with Suzie and her family to Disney World last Christmas break.
Each member of the choir and each kid in her class received a carnation to put in a large vase with a Happy Face on the front. As the kids filed up, with the piano playing Pachebel’s Canon (which until now, they all recognized as “the Graduation Song”) the bouquet grew larger and there really was a sense of coming together and acknowledging, of remembering, and being able to let go.
Maybe I just imagined it but on recess duty, it seemed as if the play was more raucous and the running freer than it had been all week.
Copyright 2003
