Vācā - Word
In the preface to Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains that after liberation, he did not know how to write his account of surviving Nazi horrors, of turning his back on his own father, of becoming one of the walking wounded, because words had ceased meaning what they used to mean. There were so many words -- chimney, gas, smoke, selection -- whose meanings he'd understood differently before. But how do you function in a post-apocalyptic world where the words that other people know mean something so catastrophically different to you now? And how do you communicate your experiences to people who cannot begin to fathom the atrocities those words might hold for you?
I would not have had the strength or courage to survive what Wiesel experienced. But when I read that about the failure of words, I understood it. Words are my life -- reading them, writing them, teaching students to use them more effectively, how to manipulate words to win arguments and persuade audiences. Words are how I make sense of the world. If I ever quit being an English teacher, it will only be in order to become a librarian, a job in which I could continue to promote the value of words.
But sometimes words fail.
When that happens, I find myself desperate, becoming increasingly agitated as I keep trying to FORCE THE WORDS to make sense, filling up pages and pages and pages with them, hoping that somehow if I put them in the right combination or break enough pencils on them, they will begin meaning something that I can understand. Sometimes I fill journals full of words, blog posts full of words, and they still don't make sense.
Sometimes the world just doesn't make sense.
A thing I appreciate about mystics (of which Wiesel was one) is that they are concerned more with Life's questions than answers. The guru from our last yoga session said Life has certain "Unanswerable Whys."
Here is my Unanswerable Why:
Why is Will dead?
I taught him 3 years ago. He wore work boots to school everyday. He was a country boy through and through and often wore camouflage to school, as well.
Will had my class 1st hour, so he trooped in at 7:05 every morning and wrote "WORDS CLASS" really huge on the board, lest anyone forget what we were supposed to be learning in Room 517.
Underneath that, he would write "___ Days Until ___ -Hunting Season" and fill it in with the appropriate number of days and animal he was preparing to annihilate. Eventually he left off "WORDS CLASS" and only kept the most important part -- how soon hunting season would be arriving, as if we were all preparing to hit the fields with him and equally excited.
Will was a good kid. And even though he claimed to be terrible at English and always to have failed it previously, that never made sense to me. He could write. He was a good student.
Last month, two boys from FZN died in a car crash. When I first located the news article, I was less concerned with what it said and more concerned with the identities of the students. Were they mine?
Like that somehow made it less horrible.
Will's name jumped out from the screen. BUT. It wasn't him. It wasn't him, he was just being interviewed. I did not reach out to Will, or to the pair of brothers I taught who had lost their family in that car crash. I meant to, of course, but with switching school districts, there was so much to do, and FZ had already cut off my access to student contact information.
And then I got the text this week that Will is dead now, too. Losing his best friends had been too much for him to handle.
I searched my Google Drive in the hopes that I could find some of Will's words, all of his words, all the words he ever wrote for me. But I'd deleted them. I erased countless words from countless students when I transferred districts, thinking that I wouldn't need their various narrative essays and thematic analyses and "All About Me" assignments. So now I have nothing of Will's, nothing to note that he existed, that he wrote and thought and laughed in my classroom.
I don't have the right words to honor him. I don't have any of the words that he deserves. Will was my student and he deserves to be remembered and valued and noticed, but that is another thing for which I have no words.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
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