Kathy's Files: Tribute to a Friend
The following tribute was written on June 17, 2005. Ashlie's recent blog got me thinking about my lost friend, and I thought she deserved to be honored by some of the students who are feeling her influence...whether they know it or not.
So I'm sitting here thinking about something that happened yesterday while I was going through the filing cabinets of my friend who died in December. Kathy's family came in long ago to clean out her personal items, but the filing cabinets were still as she left them: twenty-five years' worth of teaching material in two four-drawer cabinets, more than 300 folders and thousands of sheets of paper. The lazy part of me considered just leaving it for the new teacher next fall, but because Kathy and I worked together for the past five years, I was sure that I could make more sense of it and better identify what was most useful and what could be safely recycled. Also, I confess to a certain impression that it was something I was "supposed to do" out of respect for her memory and the thousands of lives she touched in her career. So yesterday I went over to the school to get started.
Kathy's filing cabinets spent most of the past few years in the portable classroom to which she was moved three years ago when it was decided that the special education class needed more space. While I would have been outraged had I been displaced from what was unquestionably my room (because I was the only teacher who had used it since the school opened), Kathy took the move in stride. I suspect she actually liked being in the portable because, unlike the school building proper, portables have air-conditioners, so for once she had control of the temperature in her own classroom. Also, I think she liked being as far away as possible from the office...where the administrators were. See why I liked her so much?
When Kathy left the school in early December, having been incorrectly diagnosed with a spider bite and told to take a couple weeks off, she left the portable exactly as she expected to return to it after the Christmas break. No one knew at the time that Kathy's classroom was to be moved back into the school when the new addition to the building was finished and the portables were taken away. Neither did anyone know that Kathy would not be returning at all. The spider bite was actually a blastoid caused by leukemia, and she started chemotherapy immediately, believing that it was something she could overcome, as she had overcome other cancers before.
Kathy had survived a rare form of cancer (most often found in teenaged boys) that required chemotherapy, which left her exhausted and miserable for much of a school year. She would take Fridays off for the treatments, suffer all weekend, and be back on Monday for school. Most of us didn't recognize at the time what an incredible achievement it was that she could even continue to teach; in fact, most of us didn't even know about her treatments because she seldom said anything about them. During the year after Kathy survived this first ordeal, my mom had breast cancer and all the requisite surgeries and treatments that go with it, including chemotherapy. It was only after seeing what my mom went through that I realized how remarkable Kathy was to keep coming to school for all those months when she must have felt horrible. (She once quipped, in her wry way, that she purposely scheduled her treatments for Fridays so she wouldn't have to attend faculty meetings: "I'd rather have chemotherapy," she said. Is it any wonder that her sense of humor is what I most miss?)
Then, in the typically unfair way of the world, Kathy's cancer recurred a few years later. By this time, she and I were teaching the same classes, and between us we had most of the ninth graders. We were an excellent team, and while we were never particularly social beyond the walls of the school, she and I spoke every day, laughed often, complained much, and shared many things besides lesson plans. When I finished my master's degree, she brought me a pie. When my kids (not students but my own kids) followed me around the school, she plied them with treats and welcomed them to sit in on department meetings. She was always in the middle of a service project, and most of the service oriented things that now happen at the school were originally her idea. If anyone deserved NOT to have cancer, it was Kathy. The doctors had told her that she might lose her arm to it this time, and she told me that if this were the case, she would not undergo chemotherapy again. As the meaning of this settled like a cold shadow on my soul, I recognized in her a kind of bravery I was heretofore unfamiliar with. She ended up trying an experimental treatment that wasn't quite as horrible as chemotherapy, and it worked. She'd beaten cancer twice.
I spoke to Kathy for the last time the day before the Christmas break began. I called her from my classroom. She was to be hospitalized for a month or more while the chemotherapy was administered. She described the procedure as having a kind of thick, orange Kool Aid injected into her neck once a day, but she was confident that she could beat it. Although she did not know when she could return, there was no question in her mind that she would. She confided to me that, although she had once sworn off chemotherapy, she wanted to see her nieces and nephews and their children continue to grow up. When I hung up, I fully expected to see her again before the end of the school year, but I got the call less than two weeks later. It wasn't the cancer that killed her; it was the treatment.
I attended the funeral, tried to help the substitute who took Kathy's place, and at the end of the year we paid tribute to her in our final awards assembly. It wasn't enough. Nothing we could say could encapsulate the effect she had on the place and on those of us who had been there with her since the school opened. She would have given better; she deserved better. But life goes on.
And yesterday I stood looking at those two filing cabinets, far enough from the initial pain of loss to begin pulling out the contents and deciding what to keep, what to recycle, and what to chuck. Going through another teacher's files, I discovered, is a lot like going through someone else's underwear drawer. It seems so personal, almost a violation. While I didn't actually find any underwear, I did find some stuff what wasn't purely educational: a small camera, undoubtedly the one she had used for the seven or eight years she had been the studentbody advisor; a really cool top that spun for hours with one flick of the wrist, and some other toys suitable for the grand nieces and nephews that may have visted her in her classroom periodically; pictures of those grand nieces and nephews; stray sheets of stationery and blank cards for the numerous kindnesses she visited on the rest of us at regular intervals; an 8-pack of combs, I am guessing, for the male studentbody officers who were prone to be less-than-perfectly-attentive to their appearance at school events; a baseball (?); her master's thesis, written in 1988 (on a typewriter!); and various odds and ends collected and forgotten about over the years.
I took the multitude of folders from the top two drawers of one cabinet and piled them on various desks at the front of my classroom. In doing so, I realized that, like me, Kathy obviously had her own system of organization--one that defied simple description and stymied everyone but her. For example, at various spots in the top drawer, she had five folders titled "Honors English," but none of them contained more than three sheets of paper. Surely she could have put them all in one? As I discovered numerous other repeated titles, it dawned on me that Kathy probably made a new file every year, not remembering that the others were there. This is precisely the reason I tell myself I will spend part of every summer "cleaning out" my own file cabinets, and yet I never get around to it. Most teachers know that there are a few really important, useful folders in any cabinet; the rest are essentially long-term storage for things you don't have the heart to throw away.
At one point I reached into a folder that contained packets of information that were too thick to be attached together with regular staples; they had been stapled with industrial strength metal hooks, probably fired from a pneumatic gun. In grasping at one of the packets while balancing a pile of folders on my opposite arm, I ran one of those metal hooks into my thumb...deep. It was a clean puncture, straight to the bone and out before I felt the pain. A drop of blood appeared and quickly turned to a sizeable bubble on the end of my thumb, threatening to become a small red river that would flow onto the floor, the folders, the desks, and all surrounding localities. I dropped the folders and turned my attention to keeping the blood only on my hand while I searched for something to staunch the flow. Here's the weird part: I backed up against one of the desks that had a jumbled heap of folders on it. When I turned, brushing it with my hip, one of the folders opened. Inside, atop a stack of worksheets about research writing, was a single new Band-Aid.
Say what you will. Scorn if you must. What was a Band-Aid doing in a folder full of worksheets tucked away for who knows how many years? How is it that I just happened to place that folder on top of the pile and brush it in just such a way as to open it without spilling the contents onto the floor, discovering the Band-Aid at the precise moment I needed it? Yeah, it was probably coincidence. But I'd prefer to think that Kathy's still watching out for me.
So that's what I'm going to do.
Today I went back to the school to continue the task. I have thus far placed at least 1000 sheets of paper in a recycle pile on my own cabinet; I have collected a stack six inches deep of manilla file folders, now empty but for Kathy's firm, calligraphic script; I have gathered an extensive pile of useful material to be spread out into my own folders and shared with future colleagues, a fitting metaphor for how special friends continue to touch our lives even after they are gone; and I have collected a small pile of semi-personal materials (pictures, letters, saved notes) that will be returned to Kathy's family, along with a copy of this tribute, when I finish.
We are hiring a new ninth-grade teacher today, someone to permanently fill Kathy's position, someone to help us rebuild our English department. This person will have no idea how profound a vacancy she is filling, and I have already vowed that there can be no comparisons because--as a teacher, a partner, and a friend--Kathy was incomparable. I just hope that in some small way this new teacher can recognize the honor we are paying her by asking her to pick up where Kathy left off. She'll get a couple of file cabinets of her own to fill, and she'll probably have plenty of questions, which I will gladly try to answer. What this new teacher may never know, however, is just how much Kathy is helping her too. Kathy's influence lives not only in the files and lesson plans she leaves behind, but in her friends here who are forever touched by her example.
So I'm sitting here thinking about something that happened yesterday while I was going through the filing cabinets of my friend who died in December. Kathy's family came in long ago to clean out her personal items, but the filing cabinets were still as she left them: twenty-five years' worth of teaching material in two four-drawer cabinets, more than 300 folders and thousands of sheets of paper. The lazy part of me considered just leaving it for the new teacher next fall, but because Kathy and I worked together for the past five years, I was sure that I could make more sense of it and better identify what was most useful and what could be safely recycled. Also, I confess to a certain impression that it was something I was "supposed to do" out of respect for her memory and the thousands of lives she touched in her career. So yesterday I went over to the school to get started.
Kathy's filing cabinets spent most of the past few years in the portable classroom to which she was moved three years ago when it was decided that the special education class needed more space. While I would have been outraged had I been displaced from what was unquestionably my room (because I was the only teacher who had used it since the school opened), Kathy took the move in stride. I suspect she actually liked being in the portable because, unlike the school building proper, portables have air-conditioners, so for once she had control of the temperature in her own classroom. Also, I think she liked being as far away as possible from the office...where the administrators were. See why I liked her so much?
When Kathy left the school in early December, having been incorrectly diagnosed with a spider bite and told to take a couple weeks off, she left the portable exactly as she expected to return to it after the Christmas break. No one knew at the time that Kathy's classroom was to be moved back into the school when the new addition to the building was finished and the portables were taken away. Neither did anyone know that Kathy would not be returning at all. The spider bite was actually a blastoid caused by leukemia, and she started chemotherapy immediately, believing that it was something she could overcome, as she had overcome other cancers before.
Kathy had survived a rare form of cancer (most often found in teenaged boys) that required chemotherapy, which left her exhausted and miserable for much of a school year. She would take Fridays off for the treatments, suffer all weekend, and be back on Monday for school. Most of us didn't recognize at the time what an incredible achievement it was that she could even continue to teach; in fact, most of us didn't even know about her treatments because she seldom said anything about them. During the year after Kathy survived this first ordeal, my mom had breast cancer and all the requisite surgeries and treatments that go with it, including chemotherapy. It was only after seeing what my mom went through that I realized how remarkable Kathy was to keep coming to school for all those months when she must have felt horrible. (She once quipped, in her wry way, that she purposely scheduled her treatments for Fridays so she wouldn't have to attend faculty meetings: "I'd rather have chemotherapy," she said. Is it any wonder that her sense of humor is what I most miss?)
Then, in the typically unfair way of the world, Kathy's cancer recurred a few years later. By this time, she and I were teaching the same classes, and between us we had most of the ninth graders. We were an excellent team, and while we were never particularly social beyond the walls of the school, she and I spoke every day, laughed often, complained much, and shared many things besides lesson plans. When I finished my master's degree, she brought me a pie. When my kids (not students but my own kids) followed me around the school, she plied them with treats and welcomed them to sit in on department meetings. She was always in the middle of a service project, and most of the service oriented things that now happen at the school were originally her idea. If anyone deserved NOT to have cancer, it was Kathy. The doctors had told her that she might lose her arm to it this time, and she told me that if this were the case, she would not undergo chemotherapy again. As the meaning of this settled like a cold shadow on my soul, I recognized in her a kind of bravery I was heretofore unfamiliar with. She ended up trying an experimental treatment that wasn't quite as horrible as chemotherapy, and it worked. She'd beaten cancer twice.
I spoke to Kathy for the last time the day before the Christmas break began. I called her from my classroom. She was to be hospitalized for a month or more while the chemotherapy was administered. She described the procedure as having a kind of thick, orange Kool Aid injected into her neck once a day, but she was confident that she could beat it. Although she did not know when she could return, there was no question in her mind that she would. She confided to me that, although she had once sworn off chemotherapy, she wanted to see her nieces and nephews and their children continue to grow up. When I hung up, I fully expected to see her again before the end of the school year, but I got the call less than two weeks later. It wasn't the cancer that killed her; it was the treatment.
I attended the funeral, tried to help the substitute who took Kathy's place, and at the end of the year we paid tribute to her in our final awards assembly. It wasn't enough. Nothing we could say could encapsulate the effect she had on the place and on those of us who had been there with her since the school opened. She would have given better; she deserved better. But life goes on.
And yesterday I stood looking at those two filing cabinets, far enough from the initial pain of loss to begin pulling out the contents and deciding what to keep, what to recycle, and what to chuck. Going through another teacher's files, I discovered, is a lot like going through someone else's underwear drawer. It seems so personal, almost a violation. While I didn't actually find any underwear, I did find some stuff what wasn't purely educational: a small camera, undoubtedly the one she had used for the seven or eight years she had been the studentbody advisor; a really cool top that spun for hours with one flick of the wrist, and some other toys suitable for the grand nieces and nephews that may have visted her in her classroom periodically; pictures of those grand nieces and nephews; stray sheets of stationery and blank cards for the numerous kindnesses she visited on the rest of us at regular intervals; an 8-pack of combs, I am guessing, for the male studentbody officers who were prone to be less-than-perfectly-attentive to their appearance at school events; a baseball (?); her master's thesis, written in 1988 (on a typewriter!); and various odds and ends collected and forgotten about over the years.
I took the multitude of folders from the top two drawers of one cabinet and piled them on various desks at the front of my classroom. In doing so, I realized that, like me, Kathy obviously had her own system of organization--one that defied simple description and stymied everyone but her. For example, at various spots in the top drawer, she had five folders titled "Honors English," but none of them contained more than three sheets of paper. Surely she could have put them all in one? As I discovered numerous other repeated titles, it dawned on me that Kathy probably made a new file every year, not remembering that the others were there. This is precisely the reason I tell myself I will spend part of every summer "cleaning out" my own file cabinets, and yet I never get around to it. Most teachers know that there are a few really important, useful folders in any cabinet; the rest are essentially long-term storage for things you don't have the heart to throw away.
At one point I reached into a folder that contained packets of information that were too thick to be attached together with regular staples; they had been stapled with industrial strength metal hooks, probably fired from a pneumatic gun. In grasping at one of the packets while balancing a pile of folders on my opposite arm, I ran one of those metal hooks into my thumb...deep. It was a clean puncture, straight to the bone and out before I felt the pain. A drop of blood appeared and quickly turned to a sizeable bubble on the end of my thumb, threatening to become a small red river that would flow onto the floor, the folders, the desks, and all surrounding localities. I dropped the folders and turned my attention to keeping the blood only on my hand while I searched for something to staunch the flow. Here's the weird part: I backed up against one of the desks that had a jumbled heap of folders on it. When I turned, brushing it with my hip, one of the folders opened. Inside, atop a stack of worksheets about research writing, was a single new Band-Aid.
Say what you will. Scorn if you must. What was a Band-Aid doing in a folder full of worksheets tucked away for who knows how many years? How is it that I just happened to place that folder on top of the pile and brush it in just such a way as to open it without spilling the contents onto the floor, discovering the Band-Aid at the precise moment I needed it? Yeah, it was probably coincidence. But I'd prefer to think that Kathy's still watching out for me.
So that's what I'm going to do.
Today I went back to the school to continue the task. I have thus far placed at least 1000 sheets of paper in a recycle pile on my own cabinet; I have collected a stack six inches deep of manilla file folders, now empty but for Kathy's firm, calligraphic script; I have gathered an extensive pile of useful material to be spread out into my own folders and shared with future colleagues, a fitting metaphor for how special friends continue to touch our lives even after they are gone; and I have collected a small pile of semi-personal materials (pictures, letters, saved notes) that will be returned to Kathy's family, along with a copy of this tribute, when I finish.
We are hiring a new ninth-grade teacher today, someone to permanently fill Kathy's position, someone to help us rebuild our English department. This person will have no idea how profound a vacancy she is filling, and I have already vowed that there can be no comparisons because--as a teacher, a partner, and a friend--Kathy was incomparable. I just hope that in some small way this new teacher can recognize the honor we are paying her by asking her to pick up where Kathy left off. She'll get a couple of file cabinets of her own to fill, and she'll probably have plenty of questions, which I will gladly try to answer. What this new teacher may never know, however, is just how much Kathy is helping her too. Kathy's influence lives not only in the files and lesson plans she leaves behind, but in her friends here who are forever touched by her example.
posted by MRT at 11:59 AM
2 Comments:
This was very deep, Mr. Thompson. My brother, who went to Fairfield the year it opened, remebered Ms. Eller. I remember him talking about her when I told him about her passing, and he seemed almost in shock. I don't know if he was really close, or reality set in. Whatever it is, I belive Ms. Eller touched his life some how.
I loved the "band-aid" part. I know if that would have happened to me, I would know someone was helping me that day. Mr. T. I'm sorry for your loss of a friend, and this blog really helped me realize some personal things in my life. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I can't change that someone I loved is gone. Someone I cared about won't be saying hi to me in the halls, but life goes on, and all I can do is remember.
One of the hardest times of my life was this December. Unlike most of the people who have read this I was one of Ms. Eller's students last year. She was definitely one of the greastes people I will ever know. She was so funny, and never gave up. I can remember so many instances in class that made everything so much fun. She would always be teasing the boys in our class that were on the basketball team about losing or not going for a shot, and it was so much fun!! The first month of school she gave me the student of the month in English and I was in a lot of awe, but we were always really good friends since, which made it so hard to lose her.
I was sitting in my bedroom during our Christmas Break and I saw a name on my phone number that I recognized, but wasn't sure why they'd be calling me. I remember answering the phone and when I heard the news hung up the phone and started to cry. The amazing woman I had come to know what gone. Ms. Eller was so awesome and I'll miss her forever! She honestly been a true inspiration to me. Because of her I'm now pursuing a teaching career in English, it's what I really want to do! I love Ms. Eller and I know she has touched not only my life, but many people, even those who did not know her.
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