So, I got some terrible news when I arrived back to school on Monday. It’s the kind of news you never, ever want to hear about one of your students. It breaks your heart.
One of the students I taught two years ago had died in a car accident while driving home from college to visit her family here for her fall break.
She was 19 years old. Nineteen. She’d barely begun to live. And now it is over for her.
It always strikes a chord in me when someone so young dies. And yet, it’s always so much harder to bear when it is someone you had in class for six months to a year. Someone you saw every day, whom you helped learn those tricky trig formulas, showed how to graph that pesky sine curve.
She was quite a girl. An athlete, but one who wanted to do as well as humanly possible in class. Social, but knowing when to focus.
She will be sorely missed. I visited her college website – news of her death, and life, were posted on the main page.
This isn’t the first one of my students to die – I had one last year. But, this is the first one I knew more than a student in the class. I cannot even imagine what it would be like if it were one of my Crewbies. Inconsolable, most likely. (Not going to dwell on that. Not. NOT. Gah.)
My thoughts go out to her friends and family.