Critical Incident

I am reposting this because it the original post is among the oldest posts and difficult to find.


Mary Jones, pretty blonde but evil, vitriolic. She acted provocatively around the boys and spoke to me in a tone of voice that implied I was dirt beneath her feet. I came to dislike her intensely and soon called her mother about her behavior because I wanted to write her up. The mother told me Mary had been a former drug user and had attempted suicide, and had spent the last six months in rehab, and could I not patient with her? I tried. I changed the seating arrangements, moved her away from any boys who would try to use her. I sat her next to a nice boy named Tom.

Tom is the son of friends of mine. He, too, disliked Mary intensely, and while he and his family were having dinner at our house one night, he told everyone how Mary would abuse us verbally in class. Neither teacher nor student was sacred to her. Tom and I enjoyed telling each other how much Mary disrupted the class, how bad her manners were, and how could I stand her being so rude to me all the time. I was ready to write up a referral on Mary and day as my patience had run out.

Tom died 6 days later in a tragic baseball accident. It was a Saturday.

By Monday, most students had not gotten the news of his death. I was dreading second period, dreading Tom’s empty seat. I knew the class would want an explanation for which there was none. We spent that class period trying to figure out what Tom's death meant, but there were no satisfactory answers.

We are on an A/B schedule at our school, so I see my students every other day. Tuesday morning, as I was sitting at my desk, Mary swept unexpectedly into my room. She came directly up to me and put a piece of notebook paper in my hand, saying “ I wrote this for Tom.”

I am ashamed to admit that I was suspicious of her intentions. But I took it from her some what hesitantly and began reading as she stood next to me. The poem rhymed. It was 2 pages long in her large flowery handwriting, so it must have taken her some time to write it. It was an elegiac; yet not only did she try to come to terms with Tom's death, she also showed concern for Tom's family in the poem, “What will they do now?” was a line I distinctly remember.

She looked at me questioningly with her deceptively gentle, doe-like eyes. “Wow,” I said, “that is really impressive. You really put some depth of feeling into this.”
“You can do whatever you want with it,” she said, and turned on her heels and seemed to goosestep out of the room.
What to do with it, I wondered. I tacked it to my personal message board and reread it over and over again that week.
Tom's funeral was the following Saturday. On the Thursday before the funeral, I went over to Tom's parents’ house with another teacher who wanted to condole with them. She felt uncomfortable going to their house alone and had asked me to accompany her because they were my friends.
During this visit I gave the parents several of the writings I had received from others—not just Mary’s. Sam and Amy liked Mary’s poem immediately. Somehow Mary had caught their desperation and portrayed it eloquently in as few a words as they never could.

One of the baseball player’s mother read the poem at the funeral. I was touched to my inner core. I saw Mary in the receiving line at the church and gave her a hug, and thanked her for sharing such a kindness with the Gavora’s. Mary looked pleased and radiant. Before this day, she had always looked haughty and cold, but the ice in her had melted and a beautiful, warm girl was emerging.

In all honesty, by the next Monday morning I didn’t like Mary much more than I had before Chris died, but I did want the class to know that Mary had written that poem because most of the class had been at the funeral. So I told them The class looked incredulously at Mary with newly found admiration. She smiled humbly; she blushed fiercely. She shed her vitriol that day and became the person she is meant to become: kind, concerned, compassionate, caring, hardworking, and intelligent. Respectful of herself and others. She is a lovely girl now whom I like very much.

So what was the meaning of Tom's death? There still isn’t one. I still don’t get why God isn’t at the top of his game more often. Would it really have been that much trouble, God, to make that ball fly two inches to the left or right? But Tom's dying made not only Mary a better person, but also me. I had to admit I never saw what Mary had in her. Had Tom not died, I wonder if Mary would have changed because I doubt I would have been able to bring about that change of my own accord.