LANGUAGE aRTS
Lauren McGovern
Creative Nonfiction
Content Warning: Suicide
Kay-Bee asks, “Are there other teachers like you who don’t do very much?”
The sixth graders wonder why I didn’t go on the double overnight back-to-school camping trip they’d taken with Max and Lilly, the math/science teacher and social studies teacher, to a remote island accessible only by boat. They’d paddled the school’s canoes. It rained. I tell them I have a different schedule.
The real story is I often feel like a popsicle-stick person, rigid and brittle, my mouth a hastily drawn and barely visible dot. I’d snap if I had to set up a tent or wear my winter hat to bed.
In college, I loved overnights in the woods. And after I’d graduated, I met my husband-to-be at an outdoor education program. During our time off, we would set up a two-person tent away from the communal staff house, removing layers en route, desperate to zip our sleeping bags together and climb in, naked and new to each other.
We went camping, years later, for my 35th birthday, when our boys were two and nearly five. In the pre-dinner photos at our campsite, the boys are sitting on the rocks by Lake Durant, digging with crappy plastic shovels. That night, when the clouds ripped open and a moat of cold water surrounded us inside our nylon shelter, they slept some. Us, not at all. They were up at 5:30 a.m. Or maybe 3:30? We had breakfast cereal in the car, the boys giggling as they roamed free in the back. Our halting, uncaffeinated conversation became an action plan. Cancel camping. Home. The soggy tent took a week to dry out on the front lawn. After that it was a common refrain in my family when we saw sheets of rain from the safety of our kitchen: I’m glad we’re not camping.
*
When my younger son killed himself 21 days into his junior year of high school, I pulled a loose thread on the professional sweater I’d worn for decades. I was knee-deep in the pile when the school where I’d worked for years as counselor suggested I refashion the tangled mess into something else.
We are one of a handful of boarding schools for children in grades 4-9 in the US. Faculty serve as houseparents, baking zucchini muffins, joining students in the living room with their guitars, reading The Giver aloud in the hallway at bedtime. Weekends are full of study halls and a roster of hikes up and around the Adirondack Mountains.
I was done putting other people’s children to bed and I only wanted to hike with my husband. I whittled my job down. Lunch duty. Teaching sixth-grade ELA. This is the other real story.
*
My class comes in scream-singing and juggling their Chromebooks. They would be fine with reading and writing if they got to choose their own curriculum—we’re an independent school, but not that independent.
I’d designed a unit called “Roll & Respond” that included the joyful tossing of a single die to answer a corresponding reflective prompt. I thought the first drafts would take at least two class periods, that we’d share out afterwards, engage in some peer revision, write new drafts. I’d teach mini-lessons about hooks and compelling conclusions. I’d conference with each student for more revisions and get them to use their editing checklists. We’d celebrate and showcase the fully polished essays at the end of the month. If they wanted, I’d help them submit their work to any number of literary magazines available for young writers.
But the Poet grabs the instructions from me; doesn’t roll anything.
#1: What do you look forward to the most about becoming an adult?
The Poet holds a thick purple marker hostage and jabs EATING ICE CREAM ALL THE DAMN TIME onto the worksheet. The other students chant the Poet’s response and pound their fists on the desks around the horseshoe while I stand empty-handed, my mouth agape, in the middle.
“You’re stifling our creativity.”
“We think Free Write Fridays should be every day.”
“Yeah. And longer than fifteen minutes.”
*
There are stretches of time when I’m not breakable. When I’m not bleeding from my grief: a body-sized paper cut that hurts any way I move. Sometimes, driving up through the jagged Cascade Pass to school, spotting ice climbers as they unload their gear in the frozen parking lots by the cliffs, I listen to books I want to share with the sixth graders; podcasts hosted by younger and wiser teacher-champions. I picture the cross-country ski I can take by myself when classes end, on the well-groomed trails that Ben or Chris or Jeremy maintains in the potato field.
Reading class: warmer. I dim the lights and project material onto the big screen. Some students sprawl out on the carpeted floor. Others flop their bodies into bean bags or colored zentangle worksheets at their desks. They follow along as I read aloud. I pluck vocabulary words from Starfish, the body-positive debut by Lisa Fipps: mourn, twinge, bound. When one of the main characters in The Third Mushroom by Jennifer Holm realizes no amount of science will save her cat Jonas—as in Salk—from death, students nod silently upon hearing the etymology of catastrophe: from the Greek for “sudden turn.”
I teach. They write. We read.
*
For our final semester together, we dive into One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. The novel features eighth-grader Carley Connors, who has built an emotional fortress around herself. When Carley has a vivid flashback about a fight with her mother and stepfather that led to her hospitalization and foster care with the Murphys, I toss the word trauma out to the group and ask for a definition. Kay-Bee stretches one arm, then the other, toward the ceiling.
“Ooooh! I knooowwww this!”
I give the go-ahead.
“Ok, so trauma is when something really bad happens to you and it impacts the rest of your life, like school and relationships and even your physical health. It doesn’t mean everything after that is awful, but it can make some things that are easy for some people a LOT harder for you. So, yeah. You have to learn coping skills.”
The next 43 chapters deliver irony (incongruity between what is expected and what occurs), misshapen (from the Old English roots mis, "wrong," and scapan, "to create or form”), and a familiar favorite, tenacious.
Once we’ve finished the book, we discuss Carley’s choices, the trauma she endures and will carry with her, the confidence she builds with the Murphys, what healing might look like for her in the years ahead.
I power down the projector one last time and switch on the lights. Students gather their water bottles, many with friendship bracelets in various stages of completion attached to the lids. They tuck coloring pages and poems into drawers and shout to one another as they head downstairs to theater class. Alone in the empty classroom, I tug at the screen to roll it back into place.
I want a retractable life. I want to rewind and hug my sixth-grade baby, the one who wrote haiku about daffodils and a mistake couplet with the made-up word trashlushka to rhyme with babushka. I want to hear about his overnight camping trip with classmates in a lean-to—a light rain fell through the night, into the spring morning—and skip the bad parts—trampoline, broken nose, surgery. I want the sixth-grade Owen to tell me again about the way he sailed through every element on the high ropes course.
Or I want a life that unspools differently. The 20-year-old he should be now calling me up, a welcome interruption while I unload the dishwasher or water the coleus. I want to hear him say, “Mommy, what are you teaching the rascals?” I want to tell him about spending the weekend immersing myself in how-to videos on sketch notes and the power of doodling, so I can lead an extra-special lesson about vocabulary. Something to send a burst of fresh air into Monday.
*
I started writing my son’s obituary when he was fading away in the ICU. The draft with cross-outs and mistakes, fact-checked and corrected later—he wasn’t in his high school’s production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime— is black ink on plain 8 ½ x 11 paper. I don’t remember bringing paper. Did a nurse yank a sheet out of the printer for me? I always have a pen. I know I brought along a small notebook. I opened with the story of his early arrival, which took all of us by surprise. I spread a thick layer of alliteration at the end of that draft: He was a bold, beautiful, and beloved boy.
He was.
*
When I try to introduce the class to the art of pairing simple illustrations with words chosen from our latest book, the Poet says bold has more than one meaning. Taking risks, like being confident and courageous, but also the saucy kind of bold: impudent. I let them draw both.
Here is a word that does not come up in class:
Compartmentalize—To paddle around in the present while memories flow swiftly below the surface, splashing over the side whenever a gust of Bibimbap, Johnny Cash, or September kicks up.
To bookmark grief in the lexicon of loss, in order to move from the classroom to the dining room to set tables for lunch.
To find a way to love and live in both then and now.
Lauren McGovern lives in the Adirondacks. She teaches at North Country School in Lake Placid, NY. Her essays and hybrid pieces have appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Oh Reader, Gordon Square Review, Indelible Lit, and other publications. laurenmcgovern.online