The Difference 21 Years Makes

 It was April 20, 1999.  I was working at a local middle school as an Interventionist, basically a hall monitor/lunch room chaperone/student outreach staff member. It was a pretty mundane day at work, but when I got home and turned on the television I learned that in Columbine, Colorado two boys had spent weeks plotting and planning a massacre at their school, Columbine High.

Fifteen people died that day, 12 students, 1 teacher, and the two perpetrators.  Twenty-four were injured.  The world watched as children fled the building, hands on their heads, streaming past armed police.  The news was full of footage of parents waiting anxiously to find out if their child was safe. There had been school shootings before this one, but at the time this was  the deadliest, and the planning and preparation was terrifying.  

The next day I screwed up my courage and headed to school for work. To say that the mood was tense and muted would be an understatement. Mid-morning the fire alarm was pulled by a student and we nervously evacuated the building.  It was a poorly timed prank, we got the all clear and went back into the building.

I finished the school year at the middle school having lived through a bomb threat between April and the end of the school year.  As I walked out of the building the last time, I had a job offer in my hand to teach at a high school in the Fall.

I spent a week in August setting up my classroom and thinking about Columbine.  I assessed our fire drill route, where my class was assigned to stand, what my classroom looked like, and how would I keep kids safe if a shooter came to our school. In the end, I came up with a plan that would leave my classroom locked, looking like we had evacuated out the windows, with all of my students hidden from the view of the classroom doors.

School started and in late September, I decided the day had come to talk to my students about my plan and to practice it to see if it would work the way I thought it would.  Each class that day walked in and we talked about safety, Columbine, and then I explained my plan, assigned students to open the windows, turn off the lights, overturn desks near the window, and showed the students where and how we would hide by pressing up against the wall of the classroom between the two doors. I always taught withe the classroom doors shut and locked during class.  

Each class practiced, discussed, and by the end of the day I was pleased that I felt like I had a viable plan, just in case.  As I was cleaning up and getting ready to leave, the assistant principal for my area of the school knocked on my door. I let him in and he said that he was concerned to hear about my activity that day.  He asked if I knew what he was talking about.  Since the shooter drill was the primary activity in each class I replied that I guessed that was the cause of concern.  It was.  he said that he felt it was too alarming to the students and other teachers and I should cease this activity.  If I did it again, I would likely be fired.  I promised not to drill again, but by then I was sure that if the worst should happen, my kids would know what to do.

That was 21 years ago.  Now we have live action shooter drills in kindergartens.  Children learn how to hide silently in dark closets, shelter in place, evacuate with hands on their heads. Teachers are given emergency kits with evacuation routes, class rosters, and Sharpie markers to write names on students injured or dead.  Sometimes the children are not warned it is a drill and they have to hide while listening to actors roaming the halls "hunting" them.  

I think back to my innocent little plan, which I repeated in the next school I worked in.   I was going to make sure I had a plan to do my utmost to keep my students safe. I had parents complain, I had administrators caution me, but I persisted.  I wonder how many people remember the reaction I got to those drills and wish it were that simple now.

The Vanishing

My dad is dead. He's been physically dead since 9:30pm on April 6, 2020.  He died of Covid19 in the nursing home he had been in since October 16, 2019.  It was not the end I wanted for him, not the end he ever imagined.

While he physically died in April, I can say that he had been disappearing for a few years before that.  The father I knew began to fade and be replaced by a man who didn't make sense, became more and more unhappy, became unable to drive safely, work on cars with sense, began to fall for no real reason.  His ability to communicate constricted to a litany of complaints and paranoia.

It was hard to be around him and yet we had to do it nearly every day as he needed the grocery store, a doctor's appointment, the bank. Just keeping him feeling as in control of his life as possible after he wrecked his car in late 2016 and we had to find a way to make sure he never drove again.

I can't go through the litany of all the things, events, and moments that led to him being placed, against his will, in that nursing home.  I've done it in other, more private places.

What I will record here is that my father didn't die as much as he vanished.  First he faded and grew transparent in the world, then he faded more in the SNF, and finally, when Covid barred us from the SNF he just drifted away to a place I can never visit. 

I have to remind myself frequently that he is dead, not just sitting in his wheelchair in F3A, Greenbank Wing of Brandywine Nursing and Rehab on Greenbank Road in Wilmington, DE. He died in his room, alone. He was removed by our funeral director and cremated. I never saw him.

In a "normal" death there are rituals. We attend our loved ones as they die, we hold their hands, we stroke their hair. After they die, we wash their bodies, hand them over to the funeral home.  We have funerals, wakes, gatherings. We mourn in a collective, supporting each other and grieving together. There is a scattering of ashes, a burial, a stone, flowers.

In this, there is none of that. We were not allowed to be with him as he died. Didn't view his body. There was no funeral, no gathering, no wake, nothing.  A couple of weeks after his death we went to the funeral home to sign paperwork and pick up his ashes.  A quick drive home and now he is in my guest bedroom, waiting.

And so we wait. We wait for the pandemic to pass, though it feels like that is never going to happen. Should it pass and we can finally gather, he will be released into the Brandywine River, where he once fished, as he requested.  Further on we will have a memorial stone placed in the family cemetery in VA, but that is a long way off.  We sit in suspension, in the vanishing.