Jayme's School, My School, and the Dynamics of Tragedy

It was telling that, during the first news conference after Jayme Closs' rescue, the person beside the county sheriff who had the most to say was the Barron school superintendent.

It was a message of joy and welcoming back. Jayme will need all the support she can get in the coming weeks, months, and years, and school will be the place she can get it. For school becomes a community at high times and low, and it is the center of a 13-year-old's existence.

It is also a place that feels tragedy deeply. All schools feel it eventually.

Linda, a friend of mine in the school in which I taught, and married to a teacher buddy, died of a botched, hospital-based abortion nearly a quarter-century ago--a result opaquely kept from the community in the first days following her death; it was reported as "complications of pregnancy"--and the faculty, myself included, was badly shaken. Grown men to whom people looked for strength, wept like children. To his credit, the principal allowed me and a few other close faculty members to take several days off to assist with the funeral and simply rally ourselves to return to work with some semblance of rationality.

The students felt it, too. Linda was a popular teacher with them. With her passing, media attention was held to a minimum, emerging later when the real cause was revealed. Jayme's disappearance, on the other hand, created an instant Amber Alert and media saturation. That will return soon and some of it already has: this very morning, CBS This Morning's Gayle King interviewed mothers of three of Jayme's friends, who formed their own support-and-hope group in anticipation of Jayme's return.

It won't be the last interview attempted with someone connected with the murder, kidnapping and recovery. Media will buzz around Jayme's school as well, trying to interview administrators and teachers for their views and reactions. It will never completely stop, either; journalists will keep these events in their archives and return to talk with her as she moves through high school and, perhaps, into college. It may proceed as gently as it possibly can, but it will be relentless nonetheless. There's a lot we still don't know and we will eventually get to it, like the pages of an open book being turned by a breeze.

Pictures of Jayme in the first days following her recovery have been happy ones, with a loving aunt and faithful dog. Clearly, the bottom hasn't fallen out yet. Once it hits her, the devastating emptiness will change her life in ways no one can yet determine.

After Linda's death, as strange and unfair as it was, my school was never the same. So many of us live in small towns convinced that life goes on in predictable fashion with smiles and happy endings, so this unearthed the firmament. Some friendships intensified, some disappeared. This, too, may happen to Jayme, as much due to her sudden but unwanted status as a media star as by some otherwise harmless comment that will cause deep pain and resentment. After all, she's 13. Kids, too, say and do things that just come to them without measurement.

Amidst all this, school will go on but all will have to adjust. Yet, it will be the very center of Jayme's life in ways it never would have been had this terrible tragedy not occurred. It will be the one place she knows she can go where something absolutely normal will take place and contain whatever stability it can muster.

Teachers will be briefed on new developments in somber meetings. Some may ask whether they should even mention someone's death in English or History classes, in fear of setting off some delayed reaction. The guidance department will no doubt be sensitized for any reactions, not only from Jayme but her friends and fellow students. They will try their best to look after her but not stare, hoping that her mind can re-focus on what society will continue to demand of her--to get an education by earning grades, whatever they can possibly mean at this moment and in the future. Parents will call with information gathered from their children, whether it is factual or rumored (another unfortunate hazard of these events).

All of it will be cloaked with the label business as usual, but everybody knows it won't be. Jayme's parents won't be at open houses, at PTA meetings, or in the crowd at school games, and not at her graduation from middle school or high school, either. When Jayme sits with her aunt, it will be an unavoidable reminder of all that went before it.

When I returned to work after Linda's funeral, I allowed myself to enter her classroom before her substitute did, giving myself one last chance to experience something she loved to do before inevitably acknowledging the passage back to something akin to normality. I needed the closure, but that, too, was fleeting. Mutual friends still discuss it. It was that powerful.

It changed my life, though. Linda was our local union's treasurer, and I was the president at the time of her death. I decided, in her memory, to dedicate myself to the union far more completely than in the past, and rose to heights I couldn't have imagined.

Perhaps someone, perhaps Jayme herself, will take the energy of this disaster and harness it into some series of accomplishments in the memory of her parents, taken from her by the awful mentality that can fester from the loneliness of the rural regions, from which she saved herself by calling on whatever resources her parents left with her 88 days later. Those, too, are and can be the dynamics of tragedy, as life moves on for the living.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark