Most of my high school friends can still remember where they were the morning of Saturday, March 21, 1987. I was at an early-morning babysitting job and had gone back to sleep; my charges weren’t yet awake. Thirty-five years later, I can hear my mom’s murmurs downstairs—something was clearly wrong for her to have shown up at my job. I groggily went downstairs, expecting bad news about a grandparent. I didn’t expect the words, “Billy and Steven were in a wreck last night. Billy was hurt. He’s in Peoria.” Then, the pause. The horrible pause. “Steven died.”
We were all sixteen years old and in the spring of our junior year. We’d had play practice before school Friday morning and the penny carnival Friday night. I remember the songs Steven insisted we listen to that morning at rehearsal. I still can’t bear “Lean on Me.” I’ve lost friends, grandparents, and my own child, and that song still widens a crack in my heart.
For decades, Steven’s death was the worst experience of my life. For the past week, I’ve watched my students process the death of a peer. The circumstances are different—Steven’s death was sudden and unexpected, while Garret’s death came after a years-long battle with childhood cancer. Ultimately, though, both small communities were devastated and young hearts broken. Teenagers are standing face-to-tear-stained-face with their own mortality. For many—for most, I believe—this is the most significant loss in their young lives. It’s a different sadness that accompanies an out-of-order death.
It’s been a week of raw and oozing wounds, a week of tears and distractions. And today was Garret’s visitation.
Some high school students have never been to a visitation or funeral, but they went. They braved their own nervousness to honor their friend and classmate, to show their respect for an absolute fighter.
Then, still dressed in all manner of black, they came to rehearsal. They came to a safe place with people they trust. They cried off and on all evening, but they spent time with their people, did something productive, and gained some distance from an experience we would take away from them if we could.
This wasn’t our most productive rehearsal, but it may have been our most important. One of the things I remember most from the weekend Steven died was how our sweet , tiny school opened the doors and just let us be however we needed to be. The adults didn’t hang too close, but were there to catch us if (when) we fell. The gym was our safe space that weekend, and I’ve never forgotten how it felt to have that time and place.
In March 1987, we had time to get dressed for Steven’s funeral, then we rode buses to the funeral home and eventually cemetery. Yellow school buses at a cemetery—an image imprinted on my mind. Today’s last hour classes were full of students wearing visitation-appropriate clothes; these kids went from school to the funeral home. They were together. Their safe adults were on the fringes, ready to catch them when they fell.
Tonight, I watched high school students as they lived the truth that the right thing is often not the easy thing. They showed up for their friend and classmate, then they showed up for each other. We may have been at rehearsal, but their character had nothing to do with acting.
If you know me, know my story, you know I don’t intend to shift focus or sympathy from Garret’s family. They’re are enduring the absolute worst loss a parent can face. Garret’s family has my sympathy and my empathy, my tears and my prayers.
Woods Writes 