Dear Heart

Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains. ~Kahlil Gibran

My fifth grade teacher used to occasionally call me 'Dear Heart'. We were her first class, and she was fresh from college with a degree in English. She would leave the next year to teach and be a missionary in Afghanistan, and I missed her terribly. She was the kind of teacher that would rally her friends to drive us on field trips to San Francisco to ride the red and white fleet around the bay or go to a museum. She took us to the public library once a week because our school didn't have one, and she bought us paperback copies of Tom Sawyer that she based our curriculum around. She did the same with the book The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, a book that has been indelibly written on my heart ever since. But most of all, she loved us. She kept in touch with me, eventually coming back to the US and marrying.

A year or two after we moved north, she had me come and stay with her one summer for a few weeks when I was 16. Yes, she did send me to a huge conference on how to be a good christian during that time, kind of overwhelming. She had me stay with her best friend Marsha. Maybe it was because Marsha had just broken up with her fiance and my former teacher was worried about her being alone. Marsha was a bit wilder, she treated me like a grown up, not a student. Marsha told me some of my teacher's secrets, things I would never have known about her otherwise.

When I married at 18, my teacher was there with her husband and infant son, and we still have their family photo from that day in our wedding album. A year or two later, I read an article in a church newspaper that was written by her. I don't remember much about it, except the horror that her sister and her niece had been killed tragically. The article was about her grief. This was over 20 years ago. I thought it was wild that some local church had picked up her article and printed it and subsequently junk-mailed it to me. But it did explain why we had lost touch after all those years of staying in contact. She was grieving deeply.

Last year, I told this story to a friend of mine, and I decided to google my former teacher to see if I could find her and get in touch with her. I wanted to tell her that I was a teacher now, that I was following in her footsteps, and that I wanted to learn from her about grief. I googled her name, and the first thing that came up was her grave marker. I screamed, I cried, this was all so fucking unfair. She had died in 1986 when she was 34. I was ten years older than she lived to be...ten years older than my fifth grade teacher.

I hope she was there to greet my Katie and call her Dear Heart...