This has been a difficult week at Oakton High School.Last weekend, one of our students was killed in a terrible automobile accident with another of our students at the wheel. The boy who died had an older brother in the senior class, so many felt connected to one of the three.
Even those who, like me, knew none of them were affected by the wave of grief that rolled through the halls. Four years ago, two students were killed as they waited for a light to turn on the very first day of school. One had spent more than three hours in my classroom that day, and his class was never the same from that moment on. His shadow remained.
Watching dozens of my students in tears last Monday brought back that memory and ones of other student victims of negligent driving — their own or someone else’s. I watched how profound and all encompassing the emotions were. One girl spoke through her tears about being in shock for the first day or two, then returning to school to find it was all true. Then depression set in.
The next day, she continued, she was on autopilot as her emotions went numb and she began to accept the death.
Without realizing it, she was outlining the classic stages of mourning — and every moment was so much more real for her than any explanation in a psychology book.
The funeral came late in the week, and it was poignant to see students come early to school, dressed in black for the 10:30 a.m. service, to do work before they left at 9:30 a.m.
There were girls in black skirts, sweaters, and high heels, busily taking tests. I tried to imagine how their minds were compartmentalizing school, life, and death. I overheard one say to another, “I feel guilty every time I smile.”
Death is not an event easy to embrace with abandon, as adolescents tend to do with their experiences. That abyss is too dark, too deep, too bottomless.
They have a sense of death’s unwelcome, unexpected intrusion. Yet this death, like the ones that came before, will linger.
Four years ago, the absence of my student victim after the first day became a presence in our room. There was a hole where he should have been.
No one used his parking space and no one ever sat in his seat in class.
Friends lit a candle at what would have been his graduation.
The weeks will pass this year and students will take tests, walk the halls, participate in class. They will even learn to smile and not feel guilty about it.
But that first knowledge of death will stay with them.
As they move on to college, they will remember the candle, or the service, or the days of crying and hugging one another in the hallway, and that sense of loss will never disappear.
Schools try to protect children from the horrors of the outside world, but sometimes we fail, and that lesson is one no student ever forgets.
Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
