accidental feminist

this is serious April 23, 2007

A student in my Jr. English class died this weekend. I’ll not be voyouristic and link to the various articles about it. She was out w/ her friends on a rooftop in Goose Island and accidentally fell through a skylight. When Yosef called to tell me the news, I had just come out of Second City. At first, I was shocked and in a state of disbelief; then I started bawling at the corner of North and Wells.

I wasn’t “close” with her, like a friend or family member, but what hurts me is something that may be unique to a teacher-student relationship. And that is: the whole function of our relationship is as a preparation for some furture challenge, life experience, etc. I am, by nature, a transitory person in my students’ lives; there to help them in their journey for a few years and then watch them move on. But for Jessie, there is no moving on. She was in the middle of reading “The Grapes of Wrath”. She will never finish it, and now it doesn’t matter. She was getting an A- in my class; this also does not matter. SHe was absent last week and handn’t yet made-up a quiz from that day. When I came to school today, I saw the note to myself on a worksheet: “quiz for Jessie”, to remind myself to bring it in to class so she could take it. None of this matters anymore at all. And in a strange way, it matters so much more than it did before, when it was just some stupid quiz, some tiney portion of her grade, that I was stupidly forgetting to bring to class all week. Now it represents, for me, all of the little, stupid, and beautiful things she will never get a chance to finish, or to choose not to finish.

Jessie was a beautiful girl; inside, yes, but she was also strikingly beautiful on the outside. And I was always struck with her lack of self-conciousness about her beauty, her unassuming manner, her understanding that this sort of beauty was, in the end, insignificant.

Last week in class, she made a particularly insightful comment about the “heifer jokes” in the Grapes of Wrath. She suggested that maybe the reason the farmers joked so crassly about the cows having sex, and the misunderstanding over whether it was a man or a bull who would actually impregnate the cow, was because of their own sense of vulnerability to the land and their work. I had never thought of that, and I was struck by the honesty and vulnerability of the answer itself. That is probably what will always come to mind when I think of her, which I will often.