When the Sun Rises Without You

by Barbara Joyce-Hawryluk

Her chest rises and falls, hitching a little as her eyes track the second hand of the clock until it reaches twelve. In twenty-nine minutes, she’ll be dead.

A question aches inside Julie Silke, a grim tear bleeding down a sallow cheek. How do you close your eyes for the last time? Let the lids fall, little by little, as the person in front of you, the one you loved from the second you felt her kick inside your womb, slowly vanishes from sight. Forever.

She doesn’t want to leave her only child. She doesn’t want to die.

*

Julie, her mind still in reasonable working order, had cut through the squabble of hope and despair and made a choice. You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. It was her favourite Maya Angelou quotation, and it had supplied fuel during a two-year stand-off with her neurologist, Dr. Sand, and with her daughter, Rae, over Medical Assistance in Dying. She wanted MAiD. They didn’t.

Rae was an idealist, offering an optimistic flurry of Dr. Google advice, but it was Julie, not Rae, being buried alive inside a coffin of skin and bone from Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis. RRMS had been stealth in its attack ten years earlier¾lazy foot nicking the edge of a scatter rug, cups and plates slipping from her hands. The insidious assault had escalated to roaring debilitation¾total dependency, visual perversions, and over the last two years, a tenacious fog infiltrating her brain, leaving her forgetful and at times confused. Scrambled thinking triggered panic, which led to the first, second, and then final MAiD application, the first two rejected because of the neurologist’s report.

“Who owns my life anyway?!” The desperate cry stuttered between gulps of saliva and air, foam bubbling from her lips as she sat, wheelchair-bound, in Dr. Sand’s office for the third time, Rae dabbing sticky white paste from the corner of Julie’s mouth.

A question with no clear or simple answer. Not when the law permitting death with medical assistance was new and rules and requirements were still being sorted. Not when the diagnosis and prognosis didn’t tuck neatly into the criteria. Not when human beings were being human.

Dr. Sand, a study in practiced authority and clinical efficiency, didn’t see it the way Julie did. From the inside. He wasn’t hostage to the inevitable devolution, piece by piece, of body and mind—communication lost, thinking disordered, ventilator wheezing into withering lungs, tubes force-feeding wasting cells, bags and machines encrusted like barnacles on a sinking ship. All to keep the horror show running, for how long, no one could predict for certain, not even a seasoned neurologist.

“You know the criteria for acceptance,” he said, ticking the points off with his fingers. “A medical condition that’s considered grievous and irremediable, incurable and in an advanced state of decline. Intolerable physical or psychological suffering that can’t be relieved under conditions considered by you as acceptable. And,” he added, widening his eyes over the top of his glasses, “natural death is presumed to be reasonably foreseeable in the next two years, or thereabouts.”

He’d paused and she knew why. He was waiting for the words, third time delivered, to take hold, as if repetition would shake her resolve.

Her unyielding stare returned his.

“Ms. Silke,” he’d sighed. “You’re only fifty-eight years old. I can’t, in good conscience, answer the MAiD doctor’s question the way you want me to.” He read the question aloud as if she hadn’t heard it before. “Would you be surprised if Julie Silke dies of natural causes in the next two years?” He removed his glasses. “My answer is still yes, because it’s the truth. With your particular diagnosis, you could be alive two years from now, maybe even much longer.”

Once again, Julie knew that Dr. Sand’s prognosis would be the single factor denying her the right to assisted dying.

A contorted claw of knotted fingers trembled helplessly in her lap as panic raged inside.  I’ll be incompetent soon!  MAiD won’t even consider me then! You know this! Her lips quivered in fury and then flattened. She had neither the strength nor endurance for the same tired argument.

Silence filled the space between mother and daughter as Rae drove back from Dr. Sand’s office to Julie’s assisted living suite, until Rae pulled into a side street, collapsed against the steering wheel, and began to sob. “Can’t you delay? Just for a while. Please!” Rae wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I’m pregnant, Mom. Your first grandchild.”

Julie’s heart soared and collapsed in the same moment. Can I wait a little longer?

*

The summer passed, MAiD application put on hold as her medical condition declined, forcing three emergency admissions to hospital for pneumonia, lungs wheezing ragged bursts of breath while drowning in mucus and despair. Answering her question.

Boxes on the MAiD application were once again ticked and answer blocks completed. How long had Julie considered MAiD? What were the details of her physical and psychological suffering? Why MAiD versus palliative care or natural death? Why now? If MAiD wasn’t an option, what then? Was there anything that would change her mind? Was she aware of other options—withholding or withdrawing life sustaining treatments, or palliative care? Was she of sound mind? Depressed? Were there any contraindications in the file forwarded from her family doctor? Were the important people in her life aware of her decision and did they support it?

As expected, the final part of the assessment, the one requiring input from the neurologist, remained unchanged. In Dr. Sand’s professional opinion, natural death may not occur in the foreseeable future.

“Begging you,” Julie wept. “Can’t do this … Please … Another neurologist?” The words came in desperate punches after the MAID physician, Dr. Walker, delivered the news.

“Getting a second opinion will take a lot of time and there are no guarantees. Before I make a referral, I want to explore one other option,” the MAID doctor said.

Dr. Walker scoured all three-volumes of Julie’s medical files and reviewed the medical literature. What she discovered was a point of possible dispute. Julie’s EDS score, a measure of disability and progression, had jumped from level 7 to 9 since her last application a year earlier. She was one point from level 10, death from MS. With three pneumonias in less than two months, the recalculated trajectory of decline deserved consideration, not just the nature of RRMS, because it meant that Julie might well experience natural death within two years.

“Living is tough … dying harder,” Julie managed to spit out after hearing that the third application was reviewed and accepted.

“It’s not quite over yet,” Dr. Walker cautioned. The lawyers agree that you meet the criteria but a second MAID team is required to make an independent assessment.

Fire flashed in Julie’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, I can only imagine how exhausting and frustrating this is for you. We’re not trying to make this any more difficult than it already is, but we have a protocol to follow, especially since your situation isn’t as clear as others. Another set of eyes will ensure the right decision is made.”

Findings from the second team concurred. Natural death was imminent, probably measured in months, not years.

Julie finally had agency over her dying body. No more pneumococcal waterboarding, pharmaceutical straightjacketing, bedsores, infections, and freefalling into the hands of caregivers, some who coupled care with giving, some who didn’t.

*

Her eyes shift in the direction of a curio cabinet¾ a gift from her long-deceased husband¾where the clock sits, along with a swath of medical aids and supplies. Fifteen more minutes. The nurse inserts the first and then backup IV cannula.

“How you do this?” she whisper-stutters.

“Like I said before, the first medicine is a sedative. It’ll make you sleepy and relaxed. Before I administer it, I’ll ask you again if you’re sure.”

A switchblade look cuts across to the doctor.

“I know. If you hear¾ ‘Are you sure?’¾ one more time, you’ll … well … I can’t imagine what you’d do to me if you could.” Smiles circle the group, the widest one breaking through Julie’s shrunken features, brightening her cheeks with a flush of colour.

“The second medication will put you into a coma, a deep sleep. You won’t feel a thing by the time the drug from the last syringe goes in. It’s a neuromuscular blocker and it stops your lungs from breathing and your heart from pumping blood. There’s no gasping or shaking. It’s a peaceful transition.”

“Not what I mean.” Julie works hard between bursts of hacking and gagging to make her tongue fold around the words and push them out. “Your job.” 

“Ah, I see what you’re asking.” Dr. Walker crimps her lips and gathers her thoughts. “Not easily and not lightly. I think about how I want to be treated when it’s my time. What would I want if I had a condition like ALS, terminal cancer, or MS?” Her thoughtful eyes rest on Julie. “The answer’s always the same. I’d want to be heard and respected.”

A gentle purr vibrates in Julie’s throat. Appreciation.

“And so,” the doctor continues, “I do my best to listen and try to be respectful, reminding myself always that this is about you, Julie, not me. Really, it doesn’t feel like a job, not for any of us. I know it sounds cliché, but it feels more like a calling. Hard, very hard. But right, very right. If that makes sense.”

Another purr.

The social worker pulls a book from her bag. “We helped your mom make this for you, Rae. It’s a Legacy Book and it comes as part of the MAID program.”

Rae dabs her eyes with a soggy tissue and opens the memoir, fifty pages abbreviating fifty-eight years of living¾the exquisite and the ordinary, highlights and lowlights. She reads the first page; a poem Julie wrote during the dark days following her diagnosis:

Life moves the years through you

Crafting a story

Until one morning

The sun rises without you

And in the seconds before it breaks dawn

You look at who you were

And who you are

And wonder if your story

Made any difference at all

At the bottom of the page, there’s a note in unfamiliar cursive.

“Your mom asked me to write that for her,” the social worker explains.

You, my precious girl, have been my story, my purpose. I hope I’ve made even half the difference in your life as you’ve made in mine. My story might be ending here but yours is being crafted with the gift of new life. Please tell my grandchild that I knew. I had the joy of knowing that he or she was coming as I was leaving.

Julie’s nystagmus stalls and permits her eyes to stop shifting and circling for a brief moment, to rest inside her daughter’s tearful gaze. Mother and daughter living and dying together in a lullaby for suffering with a paradox to blame, as Leonard Cohen once said.

Briny tears pool in the nape of Julie’s neck as Rae whispers in her ear. “Good-bye, Mom. I love you forever.”

“Love … you … too,” Julie gasps, weary but peaceful regard drifting to Dr. Walker with an answer to the question she knows the doctor is obliged to ask: “Are you sure?”

Her head jerks a nod and Dr. Walker releases the first plunger.

“Thank you,” she whispers, as eyelids, little by little, drift to a gentle close.

Barbara Joyce-Hawryluk shifted gears from academic writing as a social worker to crime fiction in 2013. Wounded, her first book in the Scarlet Force series, won bronze in The Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Western Canadian Fiction, and finalist in the High Plains Book Awards for Best First Novel and Best Woman Writer. The second book, Bad Elf, will be released in 2020. Inspired by real events and people, the series features Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Debrah Thomas and her husband, Major Crimes Investigator Liam Thomas. Barbara is a member of Crime Writers of Canada and Sisters in Crime. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, running, and enjoying her grandkids. Her website is https://scarletforce.com/

Flotsam

by Fabrizia Faustinella

The sky was darkening, crowded by black, ominous clouds blown by a forceful wind. Dust and leaves swirled in the air, waiting for the rain to ground them again. I could feel and smell the humidity from the Gulf. I almost could smell the sea. I certainly could hear the loud shrieks of the seagulls and saw several picking up trash in the desolated parking lot of the grocery store. The horizon was a brilliant crimson, spectacular and eerie. Was the sun setting in a large pool of blood? Why do I think such stupid things? Vivid imagination or cognitive distortion? Forget it. I’d better hurry up. The storm was coming.

I loaded the groceries in the trunk of the car and I drove away. Traffic was light. It felt strange to see the entire road ahead of me, almost deserted. I didn’t want to be the only one out there when the storm hit and I tried to speed up a little. Nobody was waiting for me at home, and I wanted to get back before dark. I forgot to leave the lights on when I left, and I didn’t look forward to the darkness of the driveway and backyard.

I had to stop at a red light. As the lid of a garbage container blew away in the wind, plastic bags, paper cups, empty cans, and all kind of debris were sent flying and skittering across the ground. Farther ahead, on the sidewalk, I saw a man in a wheelchair, alone. He struggled to move forward. He was one of the many homeless people who roam the streets of our city. It’s hard enough to be homeless, but to be homeless and stuck in a wheelchair, how much harder can that get?

The traffic light turned green. I drove ahead and past him. The man was hunched over, face down, trying to negotiate the uneven sidewalk. The wheelchair was loaded with plastic bags overflowing with what were clearly all his worldly possessions.

I kept on driving while asking myself, You are not going to leave this man stuck on the sidewalk with a big storm approaching, are you? Of course not. So I drove ahead until I found a place where I could safely turn around. I went back and found him in the same spot, not having progressed one inch I parked, got out of the car, and approached him. “Hi, sir, can I help you? Where are you trying to go?” There wasn’t much around, a hamburger joint, a gas station, a bus stop, and …

“To that Luby’s Cafeteria, up there,” he said. “Could you find someone to push me?”

“Well, I’m here, sir. Nobody else is around. I don’t mind doing that.” The cafeteria was located on the top of a small hill. My city is totally flat and floods all the time. Maybe that’s why they built the cafeteria on an artificial hill. But now, what a challenge it would be to push a man in a wheelchair up there.

He was older, most likely mid-seventies, with curly, unkempt hair and a large black-and-gray beard. He wore paper scrubs, most likely given to him at the time of discharge from a local hospital. They were totally worn out, and the original blue color had faded away under layers of dirt and stains. He wore half-gloves, his fingers sticking out, revealing long, broken yellow nails. He had a strong smell of urine and old sweat. A roll of toilet paper had fallen out of one of the plastic bags, and I picked it up. The bags were on their last leg too, full of holes, ready to burst open at any time, their contents in serious jeopardy. Old food containers, boxes of crackers, diapers, bottles of water and soda, leaking and half empty, cups, plastic forks, pieces of paper with unreadable notes, and God only knows what else all crammed together and stuck to one another.

“I cannot believe I am in this situation and that I have to be pushed by a woman. I’m sorry, ma’am. This is not easy,” the man said as I was struggling to keep a straight path on the crooked sidewalk, which was littered with small branches fallen from the oak trees during the previous storm mixed with paper and plastic debris, some floating in puddles of water.

The wind didn’t help. It was adding weight and resistance to the wheelchair. I was concerned about engaging the uphill driveway of the cafeteria. What if I couldn’t push his weight uphill and lost control of the wheelchair? What if it crashed and injured this poor man? I started thinking of all sorts of disastrous scenarios. When I got there I  pushed so very hard, summoning all my strength, my body at a forty-five-degree angle on the slope. Amidst some puffing and grunting, I finally got to the top. I guess all the gym visits and weight lifting had paid off. I seemed stronger than what I thought.

“I can’t go inside, ma’am. My personal hygiene is very poor. I wouldn’t dare go into a restaurant like this.”

“I can go in. What would you like to eat?”

“I have a Luby’s card, ma’am. Let me look for it.”

“Don’t worry about it. Save the card, sir. I can go in and get you something,” I said with a slight urgency in my voice, as it was getting late.

“Don’t rush me, please. You see, people are impatient. Don’t rush me. I’ll find the card.” He pulled out three different wallets from various pockets of a black jacket. The wallets were bursting with receipts, business cards, pieces of paper meticulously folded, stickers, remnants of a life of struggles. As he sorted through them, uttering words of dismay at not being able to find his precious Luby’s card, he and became increasingly frustrated. I waited, suspended, wondering how long this would take, thinking of what to do, until I said in a calm, soothing voice, “Well, while you look for the card, why don’t I go inside? Please, just tell me what you would like to eat and I’ll be glad to get it for you.”

“Rice and gravy, lima beans, and three cornbread muffins.”

“What about some meat or fish?”

“No, that’ll be enough. Rice and gravy, lima beans, and three cornbread muffins.”

I insisted on getting something else as well, and he eventually asked for meat loaf, most likely one of the few meat preparations his poor dentition would have allowed him to eat, and a cup of ice.

I went inside. No line at the counter. I ordered the food. No meat loaf was available. I decided to get chicken. I hoped it was okay with him. I got the cup of ice, paid, and stepped outside.

“Here is the food, sir, but they didn’t have meat loaf, so I got you chicken.”

“That’s okay, thank you. I’m sorry I was impatient with you. You’re the only one who has helped me. We get so frustrated by our predicament that we end up taking our frustration out on the people who are there for us. I also apologize to you for smelling so bad. I apologize for being in your presence in such a state of disrepair,” he said with shame in his voice, shaking his head, barely looking up at me. We heard laughter coming from inside the cafeteria.

“You see, people laugh, and they move on with their lives. They laugh and they’re busy and have no compassion. That’s why I stopped going to church a long time ago. I realized that people go to church and say they believe in God, but then they have no compassion. So what good does it do, going to church like that and having no compassion?”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Jimmy. My name is Jimmy.”

“Jimmy, how did you get in this situation?”

“I don’t want to talk about that now,” he said with pain and a hint of resentment in his voice, “but I ask the Lord: what have I done to deserve this? I have robbed no banks, I haven’t used no drugs, I haven’t stolen from people, I haven’t killed anybody, and here I am. Why am I being punished like this, Lord? Lord, help me! I’ve been a good man, help me!” He lowered his head even more, saliva drooling out of his mouth, dripping on the paper scrubs.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m sorry…”

“No need to be, sir. I am sorry for you. This is a terrible situation.”

“It sure is terrible, ma’am.”

I patted him on his shoulder. “Should I push you there?” I pointed at a sheltered place on the side of the cafeteria where he could eat and maybe spend the night.

“No,” he answered, “I’d like to stay here a little longer.”

“But, sir, how did you even get on that sidewalk?” I blurted out, bewildered that anybody could get around in his condition and manage to survive. “I mean, where are you coming from? Where were you before? I’ve never seen you on this side of town. Who are you?”

“Don’t worry about it. I am … flotsam … just flotsam.”

Flotsam? What did that mean? I’d never heard that word before. I didn’t know the meaning of it, but I didn’t dare ask.

It was definitely late now and dark, streetlamps casting an uncertain yellow light on the street. It was starting to rain. I said, “I’m going now. I’ll be thinking of you, Jimmy. I wish I could do more for you.”

“Thank you for your kindness,” he said.

I headed back to the car, my hair scrambled by the wind, raindrops falling on my face. I drove home. As expected, my backyard was very dark, but not as dark as my thoughts and my heart. I opened the door, stepped inside, and felt guilt at the comfort of my home. I decided to burn a candle for Jimmy, but what good was that going to do? I did it anyway, still hoping the prayer would somehow help. Maybe it would help me more than Jimmy. It would help me to accept the intrinsic and inescapable unfairness of life, which no thought process has ever been able to reconcile in my mind.

Then I sat at the computer to search for the meaning of “flotsam.” This is what I found: 1. floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo; floating debris washed up by the tide; 2. a floating population as of emigrants or castaways; 3. miscellaneous or unimportant material.

Human flotsam. That’s what he thought of himself. The wreckage of a life, the product of a broken existence, fallen into pieces that could not be glued together any longer and made whole again.

Fabrizia Faustinella is a physician and filmmaker. She grew up in Italy and moved to the United States where she practices as an internist in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas. Caring for the undeserved and the homeless has inspired her to write about her experiences in several patient-centered essays which have been published in academic and literary journals alike. She recently wrote, directed and produced The Dark Side of the Moon, a film-documentary about the root causes of homelessness and the hardship of street life.

The Places They Could Go

by Rebecca Potter

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”                                                                             

                                                                —Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go

I have a lump in my throat as soon as Pomp and Circumstance begins and the graduates file in. I sit with other robed teachers on one side of the graduating class, so close I can smell Ethan’s too-strong cologne and read the glittery inscription painted on Olivia’s mortar board: I applied to Hogwarts but was accepted at UK. Go Wildcats! Family and friends of the graduates surround us in stadium seating. Some wear suits and ties and others wear plaid button-down shirts tucked into khaki shorts. Several parents carry bouquets and gift bags. Phones out and ready. Now and then someone yells something like “You go, girl!” or “We love you, Matt!”  For a moment or two I put myself in the place of one of those parents watching a ceremony that officially says my child is grown and will be leaving me soon. I exhale deeply to prevent myself from crying.

The ceremony begins the way it does every year, with welcome addresses and speeches. Along with worn-out admonitions about always remembering the good times of high school and dreaming big and going far, the Valedictorian and Salutatorian both mention me in their speeches. They say kind words about the difference I have made in their lives. Colleagues sitting near me slap my back, graduates turn and smile and pump fists at me. These speeches are gifts. Teachers don’t get bonuses or merit raises; this is it right here—public recognition from former students. I am honored and humbled. But it’s not their speeches or the mention of my name that causes the lump in my throat to finally dislodge and the tears to come.

It’s the names. Nearly three hundred of them. With each name, a student crosses the stage, and so does a story. Mia went with the softball team to the state championship two years in a row. Alex has a 4.0 and scored well on several AP exams. Erin will be the first in her family to go to college. Ruby’s parents emigrated from Uzbekistan; she is the oldest of eleven children. Jessica is a Mormon, the only one in our school. Chris is going to a college thousands of miles away on a wrestling scholarship. Josh shot a buck with a beautiful set of antlers last fall. Andre wants to be a musician; his mom wants him to be a doctor. Missy hates school. Jeremiah is gay and is concerned about people in our small town not liking him because of it. Troy entered my class with a second-grade reading level. Beth is pregnant; her belly is big enough to cause the graduation gown to billow out. Hannah lived with her aunt and uncle until they were divorced this year. Logan broke his foot in the first football game of his senior year. Crystal’s parents spent their inheritance on drugs; she moved out. Ethan has a drug problem; he’s been arrested several times. Kayla’s boyfriend beat her up so her parents put a restraining order on him. Hailey’s mother passed away just three years ago, and she is constantly searching for someone to be her mom.

And on and on they go. Some dream of becoming doctors or pilots or lawyers or teachers or business owners. Some are going to travel. Others will join the military. Some of them will become engineers, welders, cosmetologists, or mechanics. They will go on to pursue careers, start families, and generally do good things in their community.

 But other names whisper failure. Some of them have no dreams. They don’t know they are allowed to dream, or they can’t. They are doomed before they have even really begun. They will jump from dead-end job to dead-end job, toxic relationship to toxic relationship, never settling down or finding contentment. They will abandon their kids, end up poor, lonely, and addicted to something. Or they will live in their parents’ basement far too long. Maybe they’ll end up in jail. Some will die too young.

As they graduate, their paths split and splinter. No matter what they do or where they go, they take part of me with me with them. They take what they have learned in my classroom and leave me behind to question if they will make it and to wonder what kinds of places they will go. It is this—having cared about these people so much and knowing only echoes of my voice go with them from this point—that makes me cry at graduation.

I think about this when Michael crosses the stage. There is no one there to clap for him. His celebration is his own. His dusty brown work boots and jeans peak from below his graduation gown. He towers over the principal as he heartily shakes his hand and receives his diploma, then gives a sideways smile for the camera. He lumbers off the stage, his tassel getting stuck on his lip.

I had Michael in class his sophomore and junior years. When he was a junior, he broke his ankle then caught his mother stealing his pain medicine. I can see his mom, dirty and small, short brown hair and sunken eyes. I imagine her rummaging through his drawers, under his bed, searching for parts of him to steal—his privacy, his trust, his love.

He confronted her about it. She denied it, accused him of lying, and called him ungrateful. She said he was a terrible son. And then she kicked him out with nothing but a duffel bag, a broken ankle, and memories of growing up with a mother who needed to be high more than she cared about her child and a father who was never there.

Eighteen and homeless, Michael went from one friend’s house to another’s, holding down a full-time job. He slept in most of his classes. When he was awake, his eyes were red and his attention somewhere else. But he was different in my class.

“Well, what do you think, Mrs. Potter?” His speech was slow and drawn out, very Southern and very kind. He constantly asked for approval, to make sure he was doing the work right, to know what he needed to do better.

“Michael, it’s great.” I returned to him the crumpled, scribbled-on notebook paper that was his rough draft. He had finished the assignment a full three days before anyone else and wanted feedback on the spot. Written expression was a real struggle for him because of a learning disability. I knew he had worked hard on this assignment. “I would give it a B. Well done!”

“What do I need to do to get an A?” I knew he would ask that; he always did.

After a few more drafts, he did get the A. And he continued to work hard for me for all the time I had him in class. After one classroom observation, the principal expressed shock that Michael, whom he knew well, participated and worked so much. He wondered if he was always on task. Of course he was.

“You know why he works for you?” My principal didn’t give me a chance to answer. “He knows you care about him, and he loves you for it.”

Now Michael is graduating and will soon be starting community college. I think when Michael is in class this fall, he will hear my voice telling him he is capable. He will remember the story that Cheever wrote about a boy meeting his father at a train station. He will feel that anger again and vow to never be that person. He will be better than his father, better than his mother. He will hear me tell him how proud I am of him, as I have done dozens of times, because maybe no one else has done so. In class when he gets sleepy, he will hear me tell him, “Wake up, Michael. You got this, buddy.”

I clap hard when Michael crosses the stage at graduation. I do not even follow directions and wait for all the graduates’ names to be called before I do so.

When I first started teaching, when I cared about my job but before I knew how to really love my students, I wondered what the point really was, especially for the kids not going to college, those who will be working on a farm or in auto shop or on a factory line. Those kids will likely work hard and lead good lives, but they won’t need to know how the final chapter of The Great Gatsby is soaked in rich irony or how point of view affects our understanding of poor Miss Emily and her rose. Why did it matter if they knew the plot of The Crucible or if they had read anything by Hawthorne? I wondered why I should teach them how to explicate a poem or write an academic essay. If they couldn’t identify a preposition in a sentence, would it really make a difference in their quality of life? These questions in my early years came from a concern for efficiency and effectiveness. I did not see the point of wasting time and resources on teaching skills and material students would never use.

Now that I know what it means to love my students, my concerns have changed. What skills and content do they need to be successful beyond the classroom, whether they are going to college or not? How can I be sure to reach all of them? Am I doing enough? Am I doing it right? More difficult, what do I do about the students who will go nowhere no matter what I teach them? Teaching these stories and skills won’t save many of my students from failure. It’s more than just a possibility that some of my students will fail. So many already have.

Like Justin. Justin should be at graduation tonight. He should casually stroll across the stage, the way he used to walk the hallways, nod his head as he accepts his diploma, then with a slight, shy smile leave the stage, diploma in hand—ready to go. But while his friends and classmates are celebrating and moving on, Justin is sitting in a jail cell writing me a letter, apologizing for letting me down, asking me to help him make his life matter.

Justin was never in trouble in school. He never caused problems. He came to class with his muddy shoes, Carhartt jacket, and a back pocket with a faded circle where he kept his can of dip. His hair was unkempt and his voice quiet. He punctuated his sentences with “Ma’am” and always looked me in the eye when I spoke to him. He was quiet and uninterested, but he did his work and was respectful.

Much of his life was a blank for me. His parents were divorced. I imagine his father wasn’t there for much of his childhood. And when he was there, they were working together in the tobacco field or under a truck. His mom probably worked a shift job, so she couldn’t help him with his homework or ask about his day or give him kisses which he would pretend  annoyed him. I think he grew up in an empty house where he filled his loneliness with mischief. I think he was expected to be a man before he knew how.

Now this barely-man is alone in jail because he committed armed robbery. He and two other of my former students robbed a local convenience store. They stole beer and cash. Maybe Justin was the one holding the gun, sticking it in the cashier’s face. I hear his soft voice, the polite tones turned to quiet threats, “Give me the money.” He wouldn’t yell. He wouldn’t even sound mean. That’s not who Justin is, at least not in my classroom. It would be only the gun and the mask that would scare the cashier as he hurriedly and with shaking hands gathered the cash from the drawer for the boy who thought he was a man.

I reluctantly think about what kind of life Justin will have once he is out of jail—in a few months or possibly several years. The consequences of his mistakes will always be with him, defining who he is and limiting what he can become. And I wonder what parts of my voice Justin has taken with him to jail. Which of my words did he remember as he wrote his letter? I imagine him sitting on a bed in a gray jail cell, writing to me. He probably did not think about the O’Brien story when he wrote he was sorry. He was not considering the Longfellow poem when he scribbled about wanting to get his life straight. He didn’t care about subject-verb agreement or parallel structure or comma splices.

It was my voice telling him he was worth so much more than he understood about himself when he told me he thought he might not pass my class. It was the times I told him he was preparing to be a husband and a father. As he wrote his letter, he remembered me smiling at the classroom door he used to enter every day, telling him how glad I was he was here today and meaning it. Oh, how I wish he were here tonight with his classmates.

While I know Justin hears me, even from behind bars, I can’t help but wonder what I could have done differently, done better, to keep him out of jail. More stories, more lectures, more encouragement, more rebuke, more smiling, more pleading. Even as I wonder this, I know that no matter what I did or how strong and loud my voice was, Justin would have followed his own path. He is just like so many others who will fail no matter how much I beg them not to.

Even though many will not succeed, I still teach each one with all I have. Their lives matter, even the ones who go to jail, and there is always hope for redemption. My job is not solely to prepare students for college and careers. My job is also to care and show kindness.

Just like I care about Breanna. As she crosses the stage now, her make-up is thick, so much so that her face is lost behind it. She covers herself with fake eyelashes, thick penciled eyebrows, lipstick that extends above and below her lips. She has a septum piercing and an eyebrow piercing. Tattoos and other piercings are covered by her robe. Underneath all the make-up and piercings is a beautiful young woman with a sad story.

Last year, she shoplifted a purse. Just because she wanted to. Just because she was a rebellious teenager pushing the limits of what she could get away with. But she got caught. She told me this in the quiet of my classroom during my planning period. She sat in one of the small student desks, me at my teacher desk. The space between us was wide enough and narrow enough to make Breanna feel comfortable to share.

Her parents had separated years ago, her father absent for much of her childhood. Her mom always had money problems. This past summer she and her mom had been evicted. Breanna faced foster care or moving in with her dad. While living with her dad was probably the better option, it wasn’t easy. He yelled and cursed a lot and loved and encouraged very little. When Breanna had been caught stealing the purse, her mom picked her up from the police station. They decided to keep it a secret from her dad. But he found out. Yesterday.

Breanna said he yelled and cursed and yelled some more. I imagine Breanna sitting on the couch with her father standing over her, his words falling on her head with a heaviness that told her she couldn’t be any better than this, with a coldness that said no matter how good she was after today, he would never see her as valuable. I imagine her pushing against his angry words, struggling to leave the room and his condemnation sentencing her to a lifetime of thinking she was destined only to make mistakes and let people down. She crouched below his yelling and made it to the door. After she left, her dad called the police. The officers found Breanna, took her home, and told her to sit down and have a rational conversation with her father or face more serious consequences.

Breanna and her dad sat at the kitchen table in silence.

She was telling me all of this because she just needed someone to listen, she said. And I was there. But then it struck me that she needed something else, too. “Breanna, do you need me to talk to you the way a mom talks to her daughter?” She nodded and let out a quiet yes. So I began. I spoke to Breanna the same way I would had it been my child who stole the purse, the same inflection I use when one of my sons has really, really messed up and I am beyond yelling, with the same intensity of motherly affection.

“You are worth too much, you are far too valuable, you are way too important to be making such bad decisions.” My words were quiet and solid, slow and separated. I looked her in the eyes when I spoke, watching to be sure she heard the love behind my rebuke. “I love you too much to allow you to ruin your life by making stupid mistakes. You are better than this.”

Head dropped and shoulders hunched over, this tough girl in front of me sobbed. I thought maybe I’d said too much. Maybe I had overstepped my place as a teacher. Through her crying she muttered, “I wish my own mom would talk to me like that.”

I left the separation provided by my big teacher desk and went to this child. How I ached for her in that moment. How I wished I could do more and be more for her. Just like any mother, I wanted so much to take her hurt away and protect her from ever getting hurt again. Just like any mother, I wanted this child to be happy and good and safe, and I felt the desperation that came from knowing she was none of those things right then. I held her while she continued to sob. I knew she was not crying because she had stolen a purse.

Now at graduation, she winks at me after she is off the stage and returning to her seat. I study her as she walks by. I am concerned about her future, about her getting hurt, about how hard her life will be. She has no plans for college or work. I doubt her parents will offer much guidance. She is stepping forth into the grown-up world equipped with so many strengths and abilities but also with so much against her.

I wonder where she will go. Maybe she will end up working in a salon in a big city making people look and feel beautiful. Or in the post-partum unit of a hospital. Perhaps in a real estate agency or a bank here in town. 

But I know she could just as easily end up homeless. Or in jail. Or on drugs. Or worse.  

Wherever she goes, I hope she will recall me telling her how beautiful she is, how valuable she is. Years from now when she is hurting because someone’s ugly words are pouring down on her, I pray my voice will rise above the other and it will give her strength. While I might never see her again, I will tell her in remembered conversations that she is better than her mistakes, that grace is thick and all-covering, that it is never too late to do good things in this world. I don’t know what kind of story she is going to write with her life after today, but I am so glad to be a part of it. 

I love graduation because it represents the exciting edge of adulthood. These now-adults can do whatever they want, go wherever they want. Become whoever they want. So at graduation, I dream of the places they could go. And even though I will miss them and worry about them, I am satisfied in the hope that maybe one day, weeks or years from now, in some moment of their life when they need me they will hear my voice and, though faded with time, it will be clear and full of love.

A colleague of mine once talked about the lie that graduation is. All these graduates, smiling as they wait for their happy future to be handed to them. A huge stadium filled with family and friends cheering and clapping as these teenagers file one-by-one quickly crossing a stage to receive a flimsy, nearly meaningless piece of paper. We tease the kids with promises of the good things that await them and the amazing things they will do because they have graduated. But for many of these students, this graduation marks the highest achievement they will earn for the entirety of their lives. This is it. The pinnacle of their greatness: walking across a stage that millions of other people walk across every year while their family is asked to hold their applause until all the graduates’ names have been called.

I see graduation differently than my colleague. Yes, for many, this is it. Yes, this might be the best thing they ever accomplish. And, yes, it hurts that so many will amount to so little. But they are here. They have accomplished something, even if it seems small to us. So let’s clap. Let’s celebrate. It might be our only chance. I clap for the many who will continue to rise to new levels of success. But I cheer just as mightily for the ones for whom this is it. Because this is it. Why not cheer? These people have value beyond their destiny.

So I cheer and clap and cry.

Rebecca Potter is an English teacher at a rural high school in central Kentucky. She is currently working on her Creative Writing MFA in the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. This piece is a part of a larger collection of essays that focus on how environment and relationships affect education. Rebecca lives with her husband, three sons, and two bulldogs. 

Accordions

by Melissa Wiley

An accordion can all too easily take your breath away, and that, of course, is the danger. I was riding the New York subway the other weekend, where air is notoriously scarce, when a dark, stout man, balding though still young, sidled up beside me as I stood mid-car gripping a steel pole at its abdomen and began playing his accordion. At the moment, I was nursing one of those mild a-causal bout of melancholy that come on about a week before my menstrual period, and his music instantly altered my breathing, my own breath deepening with the accordion’s exaggerated and noisy inhalations of unaccountably fresh, ample sound waves. I couldn’t help staring, down as it happened, because he was about 3 inches shorter than me, at a large, glistening pimple insolently perched atop his left eyebrow. Soon a seat became available, and I sat down, at once perfectly gemütlich in this impromptu underground bier garden, directing my gaze upward now instead of down at the gentleman, though still a little distracted by the purulent mass raising and lowering with his eyebrows in time to the music as he ambled gaily down the car, followed closely by what I reasonably assumed were his wife and son at work collecting money in a brown newspaper cap.

The woman wore a tan sweater with a tight weave and bell sleeves and a long, flowing print skirt. She would have looked completely put together and somewhat lovely even, with her soft olive skin and light green eyes, had she not so conspicuously been not wearing a bra. The abrupt plunge of her small breasts as her nipples pointed askew like confused metal detectors within the taut tan sweater robbed it of its dignity, I couldn’t help but think a cheap cross-your-heart for her and some salicylic acid for him would have made all the difference—that and the absence of the shadow of worry on their faces, though I can’t imagine having been all open smiles myself were my own unfettered jubblies swaying quite so freely in the tunnel breeze, positioned at eye level with the seated passengers I was soliciting. But these thoughts were quickly silenced as a policeman curtly summoned them off the train at the next stop and escorted them out of the station to the muted jeers of the passengers, the ghost of the reverberating music still lingering like fraying spider silk among the metallic screeching of the train’s aging breaks.

Playing the accordion, I have always felt, is not something you can do on the sly, especially not on a crowded subway. It is, above all, an expansive, smiling instrument, a way of widening your chest and your lungs vicariously through its plodding rhythmic compressions. And whether you like its particular timbre doesn’t matter much; when it’s there, you know it, and you expand along with it to some degree. The fact that the most likely place you’ll happen upon one is at a German bier fest, two, three, or four sheets to the wind, only increases the odds of falling under its monochromatic spell. As I said, there’s no hiding from this one, and perhaps the man with the greasily climaxing mass of pus on his lower forehead should have known as much.

I had, as it happens, all too frequent encounters with a Burmese accordion during my most impressionable years. Our grammar school priest, a man we called Father John, a refugee of Myanmar, then Burma, would enter our classrooms at will, interrupting our tests in long division and American history to play songs like “Bless Me Jesus” and “This Little Light of Mine,” to which we could never sing loudly enough for his partially deafened tastes. While I was fighting against the clock for elusive traces of memory about Nathan Hale and Aaron Burr, Father John’s accordion would announce itself a mere two classrooms down, and our teacher, eyes yellowing, would whisper-scream to the class, “You are not retaking this test! If you haven’t finished it by the time Father John gets here, automatic fail.” Frantically extracting straws of surface knowledge from my hippocampus, the tempo of the encroaching song’s refrain accelerating with growing amplitude and the neighboring children’s voices metamorphosing into punctuated demonic shouts, the squeezebox-driven pressure was enough to make you throw down your number-two pencil, run screaming into the cafeteria, and drown yourself in Kool-Aid as the only legal precursor to your inevitable incipient career as a perpetually glassy-eyed patron at the local bier garden, where accordions knew their natural place. Just as Father John’s light, buoyant step crossed the classroom threshold, however, you’d scratch off the last answer, place your pencil inside its premolded slot at the top of your desk, and exhale, your face now a glowing infernal red from holding your breath to stave off the insidious influx of the chivying, caterpillar-like instrument. The accordion had nearly cost you a passing grade in history, not to mention a life of peaceable sobriety. But life, you were told by those who had lived more of it, was short, and you were prepared to be the bigger person, which even at nine years old I was easily on my way to being, Father John being the wee-est of wee Burmese men.

And in a moment, the accordion pressing its august air against the yellow cinderblocks and inflating the classroom a good 10 square feet beyond its previous test-taking proportions, you were at ease, if slightly deafened with the fresh force of the instrument’s arresting propinquity. Like all good sensory overload, however, it had the salutary effect of erasing your more distressing and entangled thoughts, thoughts of violence toward the most amiable of men, a servant of the Christian god and a refugee no less, from a place with much more textured, ethnically layered cuisine, and here he was stuck on a diet of dry cereal and corndogs in small-town Indiana. In any case, you were not supposed to mess with him, and you were glad that your hippocampus kicked in before you were driven to any irrevocable damage.

How they ever received an education in Burma, of course I didn’t know, what with their evident casual attitude toward the sanctity of the American Revolution, but I felt magnanimous in casting aside my previous frustration and shouting out “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!” with the preternatural vocal strength of a 10-year-old Mahalia Jackson. And it was the only appropriate response, even if I hadn’t finished the test and consequently initiated my decline into the life skills curriculum. Assailed by as big an oaf of an instrument as you’re ever likely to come across, I realized, you don’t send it and its player packing off the train—you let it dilate into its natural stentorian splendor and uplift the otherwise drab subterranean train ride. You don’t wear a bra and you let it shine.

But the authorities eventually caught up with Father John as well. In addition to the accordion, his other, dueling passion was King’s Island, a theme park in Ohio a tantalizing two hours away by freeway in his speeding orange-striped station wagon. He would invite up to six lucky children at a time to escape with him there every weekend with clement conditions, when he would forego the more immediate physical thrill of the water slides and roller coasters and even the gentler pleasures of the carousel for the shadier carnival games. For a singularly diminutive man, Father John had quite the arm and tossed brightly painted ping pong balls into goldfish jars as well as heavier dusty orbs into convulsively shifting hoops for six, seven, eight hours on end, crushing his enormous plunder of stiff-limbed stuffed animals into a storage container on top of his vehicle. His personal residence, the parish rectory, was an opulent three-story house with stippled flesh-colored paint. Anyone without a mania for acquiring life-size Styrofoam-filled panda bears and plush Smurfs with pert pug noses would have easily left at least five rooms hollow and uninhabited. But Father John had adorned them all with the cynosure, the fuzzy, cheap sunlight of every materialistic child’s eye. Piled to the ceiling in lampless room after room, labyrinthine catacombs of frozen plastic-eyed playfulness that would not decay for centuries, his seraglio of faux fur flesh formed an ever-smiling audience for his accordion practice. I took home dozens of toys at his insistence. One, a peach bear in a navy blue cheer leader costume with a matching bow, I only gave away to the Salvation Army this year, at the age of 33.

When I was in my early-twenties and living in Chicago, my mother told me over the phone one Sunday afternoon that Father John had been accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars in funds from the parish. Nothing incriminating I believe was ever proved, but it also came to light that, presumably in the months when King’s Island closed its gates, he plied his dexterous right arm to the craps table at the local casino, temporarily leaving his accordion and his coterie of stuffed animals behind. His superiors swiftly relocated him to another parish, ostensibly without either a children’s theme park or another nearby means of testing his limits with Lady Luck. But may God give them adult acne for ever evermore if they took away his accordion.

So in my experience at least, playing the accordion and pressing your luck go very much hand in hand. There is a trenchant vulnerability, a mordant plea for gaiety in one who straps a squeeze box onto his chest and commences playing such an instrument, sending out obstreperous cornpone melodies into the ether in a New York subway or from a provincial church altar minutes before transubstantiating a host of bread into the body of Christ. There can be no false starts here with the accordion, however many there may be elsewhere, in the background of life. Whatever drove that man in the subway and his son and braless wife to seek money among strangers for a rousing few bars of “Roll out the Barrel” or whatever similar tune he played, he was not lying low with his volcanic pimple, gripping a steel pole at its abdomen, breathing shallowly in the cloistered, damp air, and keeping his eyes on the gum cemented into the floor grooves. He was making melodic, moronic waves that made me smile. For the few moments he was there, there was more air in the overcrowded train car as a result. And that's perhaps worth betting on.

Melissa Wiley is a freelance food and culture writer living in Chicago. When not minding her Ps and Qs, she seizes every opportunity to remove her shoes and walk barefoot with half-painted toenails through airport security in pursuit of global opportunities to dance, draw, laugh, and gape. She also volunteers as a literacy tutor and endangers children’s lives when flying her kite at full mast along the beach.