When the Unimaginable Happens
The first time I dealt with the impact of a friend’s death on my students was in the winter of 1989. The teenager who died wasn’t even a student at my school, but he had been years earlier – and he was still a close friend of several of the students whom I taught. Even in the days before social media, the word of Travis Shedd’s death spread quickly. . . and while I’d like to think that my twenty-four year-old self was better than average at dispensing words of wisdom and comfort, I was also mature enough to realize that sometimes, there are no words. I didn’t suffer a personal loss when Travis died, but I grieved for the kids who were grieving. During the more than twenty-five years since, I’ve experienced a number of student deaths. . . former students who had graduated, current students whom (like Travis) I hadn’t taught but whose deaths broke the hearts of students that I was teaching, and one former student whom I wasn’t teaching at the time but who was still a student a