RIP, Connie C.

My friend Connie C. died over the weekend. She was a colleague at the school at which I teach, starting only a few years after me. She taught Social Studies and was an active teacher/mentor for student teachers from a local college. Most of all, she was a good person.

Connie was a strong-minded woman who believed, as do I, in old-fashioned education. None of this self-esteem bull-s**t. Teach content - build mature, responsible adults. She was very successful in this aim. At most schools, students talk only about teachers they don't like or who have made them mad that day. A "good" teacher is one about whom you never hear. You never heard about Connie. Never. She was highly respected by her students and by her colleagues. Our faculty is very divided. I joke that we represent the two sides of the Force. Those like me and Connie are on the Dark Side. Generally members of the Dark Side have nothing good to say about the White Siders and vice versa. Connie was one of those rare people about whom both sides spoke highly.

Personally, I liked Connie. I don't like all of my colleagues, but Connie was a great gal. The only time I felt that things were somewhat sour was right after I experienced my initial terrible weight loss. I felt as if Connie was avoiding my eye in the hallway and I noticed that she did not chat with me as much as in former days. I wondered if it had something to do with the fact that Connie was a very large woman and I admit to some rather ungenerous thoughts on the subject. But, things smoothed out over time, coinciding with my failure to die (as many suspected I was going to do, I think) and her own progressive loss of weight. For both of us, though, that weight loss was not a signal of good things.

For the past few years, I had noticed Connie losing more and more weight, but not really looking healthy. She seemed to tire more easily and I didn't see her smile as often. But, teaching is one of those up and down professions. Some years are great, others are nightmares. So, colleagues seem quite upbeat some years and may through a year or even several wear more frowns than grins. But, Connie never really seemed to pull entirely out of the negative zone.

This year, Connie talked to me a lot more. I knew that she had been "sick," but that's about all that is ever said about people. To date, I know that very few people at my school have any idea what is going on with me. I was "sick." Connie was "sick." We chatted casually about how the medical system needed an enema and laughed over the day-do-day comings and goings of work. It was nice.

I haven't seen Connie, of course, since I have been out of work and have not been able to keep up with any news from school. The word arrived via telephone from one of the school secretaries. After a diagnostic battle as herculean as mine, Connie was diagnosed with a type of leukemia on Friday and then, this weekend, she suffered a stroke and passed away. My school has lost a spectacular teacher, I have lost a friend, and the world has lost an magnificent human being.

I don't believe in "heaven." I believe, though, that nothing really dies. It can't. It is a fundamental principle of physics that neither matter nor energy can be destroyed, they can only change form. That is what I believe. When we die, we no longer consciously channel energy into keeping our atoms from following the natural processes of entropy. Upon death, the universe works its normal wonders to take apart our molecules and send the bits and pieces to other places where they are needed. We become part of a hundred thousand other things. The grass, a beetle, a newborn kitten, the soil which nourishes a wildflower. We never die because we continue to contribute to life. Langston Hughes had it right:

Dear lovely Death
That taketh all things under wing -
Never to kill -
Only to change
Into some other thing
This suffering flesh,
To make it either more or less,
But not again the same -
Dear lovely Death
Change is thy other name.

RIP, Connie C. I'll miss you.