June 17, 2016

Nine days ago, Raekwon Brown was shot and killed outside the Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Boston. Raekwon was one of my students when he was a 9th grader and I was a 23-year-old teacher resident, soaking in everything I could that might help me connect with my teenage students. At the time, I didn’t expect grief to be part of my job description. As I was busily crafting lessons on sentence structure and reading strategies, it didn’t fully occur to me that one day I would face the news that a student had attempted suicide, gone to prison, or lost a friend to a gun.

I learned that Raekwon was dead when a photo of his face appeared on my facebook feed Wednesday night. The news was posted by his math teacher, who had seen him living, breathing, and doing algebra earlier that day. I hadn’t thought about Raekwon for at least a year, but instantly, memories of my time with him came flooding back. I remembered the sound of his voice, the way he wore his hair, the way he sauntered down the wide halls of the Burke with his friends Yesley and Jayden. The idea that he was now dead, shot just steps away from his school, felt like a punch to the stomach. To be killed at 17 was tragedy enough. But to be shot in broad daylight outside a school? My body shook with sobs as I imagined the terror and sadness his classmates and teachers must have felt that afternoon.

I floated through the next few days under a dark cloud of bitterness-tinged grief. No one at the school where I work was talking about the shooting, so I pushed numbly through the school day, pretending that everything was okay. But nothing felt okay. On Thursday and Friday, small annoyances felt like swords instead of needles; I was irritable with my colleagues and angry at the world.

Raekwon’s death came on the heels of another earth-shaking tragedy for me. Earlier that week, one of my 9th grade students (I’ll call her Erica) told me that she had tried to commit suicide by taking her mother’s sleeping pills. Erica, one of the most creative and unafraid thinkers I’ve ever taught, has struggled with depression all year. When she told me what happened, I brought her to one of my school’s incredible counselors, who arranged for Erica to stay at a psychological support facility. I hadn’t seen her since, and I had no idea when she would return to school or if she was safe.

The Orlando shooting, four days after Raewkon’s death and seven days after Erica’s attempted suicide, completed my trifecta of grief. This time, the death was less immediate but just as senseless. I felt angry at our country for allowing fear and hatred to be armed with assault rifles, and I felt sorrow for the ripples that would affect my LGBTQ friends.

Yesterday, Erica returned to school after a week and a half out of school. When she appeared in my doorway, 20 minutes after the start of class, I motioned her into the hallway. I hugged her, hard, and immediately started crying. Unlike every other time I cried in the last week, these were tears of joy and relief.

Today, I didn’t cry at all. It was an end-of-year community day at my school, so I showed my students how to watercolor. I sewed colorful headbands with a few girls who were afraid of burning their fingers on the hot iron. In the afternoon, I ate cornbread and potato salad with my coworkers and biked home in the sun. Death was nowhere in sight.

I no longer feel the cloud of grief that shadowed my vision for the last week, which itself makes me feel a little sad. Isn’t Raekwon worth more than a week of tears? Doesn’t Erica’s pain merit more than a few days of my empathy? And the dozens of people killed or injured by the shooter’s hatred and guns– how could I enjoy today’s perfect June afternoon knowing their anguish? But I can, and I did.

Last week, I listened to a segment on This American Life about a neurological condition called HSAM: Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. Individuals with HSAM can recall precise details about any given day in their life: what they ate for breakfast, what they did that day, what the weather was like. As someone who once journaled obsessively, hoping to preserve each day on paper, such a powerful memory at first seemed like a superpower, a gift to envy. But as the This American Life reporter found, a flawless memory is more foe than friend; the people she interviewed talked about being so weighed down with the memories of their mistakes or break-ups or fights. With HSAM, a person never forgets the visceral emotions of the past.

I felt grateful to forget the pain of this week. Of course, I hope that I will always remember Raekwon and Erica and the tragedy of Orlando. I hope that my subconscious will not sweep all the ugliness and heartbreak I encounter in my life under a rug of comfort and naivete. But without some degree of forgetting, I’m not sure I could get up in the morning. And no matter how bad things get, I believe it’s always worth getting up in the morning. It’s worth fighting to get deadly weapons off our streets and out of the hands of hate-filled people. It’s worth lending a listening ear to a student, even when grading is piling up on my desk and emails are sitting unanswered in my inbox. It is worth it to pull the world towards better even when the world’s injustices feel too heavy to bear. Forgetting grief is a part of moving forward, and so is remembering the wrongs that need righting. Perfect balance between the two seems impossible, but it’s where I want to live my life.