Grief is a Teacher

This past week my 8-year-old learned to ride a bike.

This past week my friend’s 6-year-old daughter died. A car hit her as they stood waiting at a crosswalk.

This past week I started teaching a course on ethics and leadership. I should be offering nuggets of wisdom to my students around the application of philosophical and ethical arguments to their lives.

But this week life doesn’t feel fair or ethical.

How to celebrate with my son and grieve with my friend on the same day? How to watch my little boy pedal away from me, triumphant, calling back, “I’m proud of me!” — while three hours away my friend says an unfathomable goodbye. “We took her off life support,” says her 10pm text message. How to grieve and parent and teach and wife and daughter and friend all at once?

This short piece from The New Yorker offers some suggestions: from Joan Didion to C.S. Lewis, the author describes reading for her life while trying to navigate the grief of losing a parent. The educator in me finds solace in the essay’s closing paragraph. Directing the reader to T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, an Arthurian fantasy novel, the author writes:

The magician Merlyn is giving advice to the young King Arthur: “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewer of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.”

Grief is the teacher I want to avoid in the hallways. The one I look away from when she walks past my desk. But if learning from grief is “the only thing that never fails,” I have to try to at least show up to take attendance.