For The Last Time

In my corner of the world, another young life has been lost.

Car accident this time. High school sophomore. I didn't know her, but I taught her mother, and she was on the yearbook staff now handled by the colleague who stepped up when I retired.

The loss of a young life happens with depressing regularity, enough that a teacher learns the recognizable and repeated arc of student reaction. 

There is a shock that runs through the whole school. My district is small-ish and rural, so everybody knows everybody, and so the shock travels swiftly, even to those who weren't necessarily close.

There is a shock of loss, the phantom limb of the heart where the person used to be attached. There's the replaying, the reeling back memory. When the last time I saw her? What was the last thing I said to her? There's the shock of confronting mortality, of understanding at the bone that any day may contain some last times.

It's a hard thing for teens, whose default setting is to believe that they are immortal and indestructible. 

In the immediate aftermath, the students are remarkably tender. You find yourself in a community in which everyone walks around interacting with every person they meet as if it's the last time. Jerkish behavior drops by, like, 75%. The most sensitive students are haunted by the sense of being fragile vessels, always at danger of damaged, ended, and not in a gloriously dramatic way.

It's not sustainable, and it fades, usually within a week or so. The sense of connectedness, of fragility, of the looming lasts of life--those all fade away. It is a marvel of human life; despite all evidence to the contrary, we prefer to live as if we have infinite chances, an endless supply of days that we can squander without care or consequence, the certainty of our passing reduced to a background hum as we sleepwalk through life. 

It's tragic that we are most commonly broken out of our sleep by the worst, the very worst, of events. 

Right now, dozens of students from my old school are grappling with the fact that when they said goodbye on the last day before vacation, they were saying goodbye to one classmate for the last time. That's a heavy lift for a teen. 

Heck, it's a heavy lift for adults. We are wading through lasts every day, and mostly we don't know they're lasts until it's too late to treat them with the kind of importance we lay on them once their lastness has been revealed. 

It is (stay with me here) like teaching. The teaching day is filled with moments, decisions, choices, and some of them will disappear without a ripple and some will turn out to be hugely important. Every teacher has that story-- years later a student tells you about something you said or did that was hugely important and you don't even remember doing it. 

Some moments turn out to carry great weight, and others, not so much, and the trick is that we can only tell the difference in hindsight. 

So why not treat each moment as if it's an important one.

Why not treat each time as if it's a last time?

Okay, to go 100% on this would be exhausting. But we can try harder, more often. Because once again a young person is gone way too soon and there's nothing to do about it except maybe be a little more kind and thoughtful about the people who are left with us today on this ball of dirt spinning through the universe. Or as Vonnegut put it

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”