Affirmations

Tuesday afternoon, sleeping on my giant doggie bed in front of a winter fire, I was awakened by a firm knock. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” :

         While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.      

         As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.                                 

It was not the gentle rap of ravens, but the kind of delivery people give, so I started to ignore it, but I thought I should check just in case. When I opened the door a crack, my puppy Dosey and I could see that someone was there, so I said, “Hang on,” closed the door, gathered Dosey into my arms, and re-opened the door, wide enough to see the person this time.

A forty year-old woman with red hair and a big smile said, “Hi, Ms. Edwards.” At first I didn’t recognized her but then saw in her eyes a teenager from twenty years ago.

“Oh, my gosh! Come in!”

We sat in the living room, and she and I shared some stories to bridge the decades. Then she gave me the book The Ironic Shituation: the actuality of Everything, a book she published in 2016, and I leafed through it. For some reason, I paused at the Gratitude & Appreciation page. I read this:

My high school English teacher Ms. Mary Edwards—I appreciate the way you challenged my intellect. Thank you for the freedom to find and express my own voice in your assignments. I felt my mind come alive in your classes.

I was stunned. This appreciation from so long ago, an appreciation I did not at all expect, means so much to me. In these post-tumor days when I can no longer teach, this note reminds of how much my students meant—still mean—to me. It makes me feel that, though I didn’t have the impact on public education that I aimed to have, my teaching made a difference to some students in ways that I would never have guessed.

Thursday night, my partner Ann and I had dinner with another of my previous students, this one a freshman in my English class in Dallas in 1990. He was in Seattle from New York City to defend his PhD dissertation in Psychology at The University of Washington.

Ann and I got together with him and his partner when they lived in Seattle, so Thursday’s meeting was not a surprise. Seeing him again for the first time a few years ago, however, was a surprise. Each time I see him I appreciate the unexpected connection. Once, he told me about a time in class when I invited students to share a thesis if they had one for an upcoming paper and to share any ideas which they had decided not to write about. They could steal someone else’s discarded idea if they wanted to. He did.

What I remember about that time is the sense that I had no idea what I was doing: “imposter syndrome,” this student, now a man, told me. I was glad to hear that in those early days I did something that seems to me now like good teaching.

From these visits, and from the cards, Facebook posts, and emails, I feel like some of my previous students tell me that I was a guide in the way I wanted to be: perhaps I helped them find their voices and a possibility that they were okay—not only okay, but miraculous—as they were and would be okay —even miraculous—in the future, even if they would be different than they or their parents had imagined.

Now that I can no longer teach, these students—now adults—tell me that I was okay—even miraculous—in my teaching days, and perhaps I’m learning from them that I am still okay—even miraculous.

My life has shifted with all that I cannot do, though I realize my life would have shifted anyway (because lives do that). I am lucky to find things that I can do, perhaps things that I couldn’t have done before.

Last Friday, with the poet Roberto Ascalon, I facilitated a reading (mostly poetry and one very short short story) by seven people experiencing memory loss, and a wife and a daughter of people with memory loss.

The reading was lovely, peppered with poets’ statements of belonging like “I’m still here” and “I am. I am a work in progress. NOW.” And one poet’s doleful questions:

*Who will hold me tight?


Who will whisper “I love you”?


Indeed, who even will remember me?

The poet Holly J. Hughes read her gentle poem “The Bath” from the anthology she edited, Beyond Forgetting: Poetryand Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press, 2009).

Then on Thursday morning, a writer in a group with young people who are homeless beamed with the news that he would be starting college in January. He told the group, “When I experience something painful, I can write it down and put it to the side” (he accompanied this explanation with the visual act of moving papers from in front of him down the table). “That way, it’s still some place, but it’s not in me any more.”

No, I wouldn’t have asked for these brain tumors or these disabilities, and I wouldn’t have left the field of education if I’d had a choice. But today I’m feeling that my time there was meaningful, though it’s gone. I live a new meaningful life now, one built on days past—days that are no longer possible for me—but also an awareness that now I live in new possibilities.

*DEPARTING PORT

By Philip Culbertson

Slowly, I’d begun to notice the great ship― 

built so rigorously, moored so carefully― 

drift slowly, slowly, out into the open sea.

I had hoped that was an illusion, for

I had been concussed and was no longer sure what was true.

I had hoped for better.

Freud assured me that my ways of thinking would continue to be stable,

but my brain responded: 

“You think you can ignore me, but I know better. You are a jokester.”

I thought a jokester was like a jester—a wag, a wit, a harlequin, but

rather than laughing, I suddenly found myself weeping, day after day,

asking “Why? Why me? Why now?”

“I’m not yet done with living,” say I, 

yet my body screams “You’re done!!!”

Can this truly be the end?

I’m not quite through living, even when my time is short.

Who will hold me tight? 

Who will whisper “I love you”?

Indeed, who will even remember me?