Dealing with death in the time of Corona
Death is never easy, especially when it arrives unexpectedly. I understand many (hundreds of thousands) are dealing with the deaths of loved ones due to our country’s poor and late response to the Corona virus. So it feels weird to post my thoughts when so many others might be feeling a worse pain than me.
I suppose this is a little unique in that this brush with death isn’t related to Corona at all. As you may know, by night, I am an artist, but by day, I’m a teacher. I think of each of my students as one of my own. I literally spend more time with them than my own kids, and worrying about their success and failures and what the future will hold consumes much of my thought.
A few days ago, I received a text with showing the blood-covered floors of the local shopping center. I was confused. What is this? I don’t want to see stuff like this. Minutes later, more texts came rolling in. This was Aaron Franklin*, one of my students. Initially, there was shock, but all reports were positive. It wasn’t as bad as it looked (the body has a lot of blood in it, they said) and he received care on sight. He was being rushed to the local hospital.
In the next half hour, texts kept flying in. Prayer chains were started, but Aaron was supposedly awake and cognizant of what was happening. News and rumors seemed to be skewing a positive direction. In the next few moments, word reached me that he was being rushed into emergency surgery. Then this text: “Sorry to say this…but he passed.”
I sat up and yelled, “No.” The sorrow was like an enormous wave. I felt a pressure in my chest like I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t sobbed in a long time, and I cried so hard that my abs hurt the next day. My wife hugged me for a long time, and that helped, but only a little. In one moment, I had a student who was intelligent, funny, curious—who would ask great questions, and really help and care for others. The next moment, he was gone, a victim of senseless and unexplainable violence.
In the following days, memorials—impromptu and otherwise—were held in Aaron’s honor. Family and teachers and students all shared remembrances of Aaron, and talked of the good times through tears and hugs. It was amazing to see the outpouring of love for an individual and see the mark that a person can leave on the hearts of others.
The man who murdered Aaron was caught and arrested immediately. There were tons of witnesses and he was all over the security camera footage. This difficult part of this whole situation is that the murderer was a former student of mine as well. This is the second student I’ve had that has murdered another human being. Since I didn’t know the victim in the previous instance, this one hurt much more than before. I can’t explain that pain as easily. There’s an intense—truly intense—feeling of guilt that I somehow failed this young man so badly that he strayed so far from the right path that he felt his only option was to take the life of another person. I’m angry at him—furious, in fact, but I’m also sad that his life is over now too, as he will assuredly spend it locked away in a maximum security prison. Since all of this happened, I’ve thought back into the reaches of my memory to try to find a time where I could have said or done something that might have corrected his path just enough to save the lives of two of my students.
And the sad thing is that I can’t think of anything specific. I can’t think of anything I could have done, and the harsh reality is that there’s probably little that could have been done by anyone to prevent something like this. It appeared to be completely random. Even though both were former students, I don’t think they knew each other at all. It was truly a case of “wrong place at the wrong time.” One of them was disturbed, and that was enough.
Which brings me to my point here…I don’t think we as a society are very proactive when it comes to mental health. We wait for these horrible occurrences, and then we respond with care and counseling for the aggrieved, but we don’t do much (perhaps, like me, we don’t have the answers) to try to help those who need it BEFORE things like this get to the point of no return. Someone, like the murderer in this instance, shouldn’t feel the only avenue remaining to him is to brutally take the life of a random person out buying some groceries. We have to do better to identify these individuals and get them the help they need to prevent tragedies like our community experienced this past week.
* Name changed to protect the innocent.
