this time last year

I post so infrequently that I have finally given myself permission to just post whenever I feel like it and not feel guilty about going long stretches without any activity. Not many people read this thing, anyway, so all that matters is that it functions as a good place to sort out my thoughts when I feel like it.

I feel like it today.

Last year, on Monday, May 7, 2012, I was on my way to proctor the second half of an AP exam when the Dean of Students sprinted past me on the stairs, a grave look on his face. This is a man who is a master at maintaining decorum, and here he was, running, in the middle of campus. I felt a chill run through my body.

Ten minutes later, as I was supervising all of these quiet students working earnestly to prove what they had learned over the past year, I got a mass text on my phone saying that there would be a mandatory faculty meeting in fifteen minutes. Two minutes later, my boss texted me and told me that she was coming down to get me and that someone else would replace me as proctor. I think I may never have been so terrified in my life.

In the hallway outside the AP room, my boss revealed that two other faculty members had discovered one of our colleagues dead in his apartment that morning. This man, who ran six miles every morning and was in every way a paragon of health, was gone with no warning whatsoever. You know how newspapers and local news will announce stories like this always in a dramatic fashion, using words like "horror" and "tragedy"? I always cringed a little at the melodrama, as it seemed like sensationalizing a very personal, indescribable thing. The headline that ran everywhere for this story was that our school community was "reeling," and when I first saw that, I had the opposite of my usual reaction: I thought how very true that was. We were all knocked to the ground.

I have said before here that the boarding school life is a strange one for many reasons, not the least of which is that  our co-workers are not just our co-workers; they are also our neighbors, our company during the majority of our meals, the friends we see all day and everyday. We spend nearly all of our time together. The image of the boarding school "family" is not an exaggeration. We have so many very profound spheres of our lives overlapping, which makes not only day-to-day living very intense, but, as you can imagine, an incident such as this is almost unbearable.

As hard an experience as this has been, it has been much worse for many close to me. I cannot fathom how our two friends who found his body that morning were even able to finish the school year. I marvel that the students who considered this man one of the greatest influences in their lives have been able to carry on. I continue to be amazed that these teenagers, an age group that has a reputation for immaturity, have been the driving force behind so many beautiful tributes to him: They were the ones who designed a t-shirt to commemorate him, who took his mother out to lunch to tell her how much he meant to them, who organized a basketball tournament to be held tomorrow, on the anniversary of his death. It's true that they say that the difficult times can bring out the best in people, and this was no exception.

Our friend was the real deal, as we all recognized. He turned our floundering boys' basketball program around and brought the team to the championship. He recruited talented players and mentored them, never releasing himself from his responsibility for them. He loved the students but did not coddle them. He was famous for his straight talk; he was honest and did not beat around the bush and consequently was one of the most genuine people I have ever known. He was exactly the person our school needed.

J and I were saying the other day that we can't believe it has been a year since his death. It seems to have gone by quickly and yet somehow also seems to have happened decades ago. We cannot believe how different our lives are now, just one year later. J is now truly a lawyer. We own a house. We have a daughter, whose existence we discovered only a few weeks after that terrible day; I'll let you do the math and understand why I think of him so often when I look at her, our own little tribute to him, an accidental miracle when we had almost given up hope that we would ever have one.

We are leaving this place. It's another story for another time but one that nonetheless makes us feel like we are living in a different life than this time last year. Removed though we may be by time, we are no less mourning his absence.