Senseless Death~

This morning I opened the L.A. Times to find the death of a 21-year old local boy in on the front page. He was killed in Iraq. His body was flown by the military to the local airport. The photographer took the picture as the mother and sister were leaning over the casket.

I read about this stuff all the time. A couple weeks ago, it was another SoCal boy - I cried then and I just let loose this morning. His mother was hugging a flag-draped box. Cold comfort when your child is dead.

I don't know this boy. He attended the local Christian high school. The hearse carrying his body drove by the school and teachers and students lined the sidewalk to pay their respects.

I know devastating loss. We all probably do - and the older we get, the more familiar we become with the shock, the pain, the grief - and the anger.

When my father died, I felt all these things and continue to mourn him. But he was 67 years old and in poor health for years. In a way, his death wasn't senseless in the way this boy's death is senseless. My father lived his life the way he wanted to live it - this boy never had that chance.

The Times reported that the young soldier joined the army against the wishes of his parents. He wanted to be a teacher and spoke of it often to his high school counselor and often returned to the school after graduating to sit in on his favorite teacher's class.

Not thinking he was ready for a full-time college career yet, he joined the army. He wrote to his father while in Iraq, telling him he still wanted to teach. He just wasn't sure how to go about it yet.

I think of the mother and grandmother and the sister and the father. I think of them and the awful grief they endure, because of circumstances. What happened to their son was certainly nothing they planned or wanted. What happened to him was the result of policies by people in power - who get to make these decisions. Death was not on this boy's mind when he joined the army - life was on his mind. He needed time to think and to grow. He thought joining the army was a good thing.

I also think of this teachers. They taught him. He sat in their classrooms and he joked around and he did his work, or he didn't do his work. They scolded him, they talked to him, they made marks on his paper. They read his words. Maybe they smiled and shook their heads when he cocked his head just so.

I work with teachers who have lost students to senseless death. We don't talk about it much. We just say something in passing, or poke a finger at a picture in the paper and someone says, oh yeah, I had him. Or somebody plants a tree in memory of a child who was the passenger in a car that was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The tree grows and half the students don't know this girl's name anymore. Her teachers remember, but nobody goes out to the tree - or trees. There are more. But most people at school don't remember anymore. Just the families recall.

My first class of students will graduate from high school this year and they don't look or sound anything like the little kids who rolled around on the rug and painstakingly learned how to write the letters of their names. I have lost only one of them to senseless death. She was ten years old and died in an off-road vehicle accident. She would be in high school now, being a mean girl or sending text messages to her friends. But she died a completely preventable death and I grieve for her when I think about it.

I can't know how this young soldier's teachers feel. I think they are very sad and some of them are taking his death harder than others. Sometimes it is just a matter of personality. There are teachers who love each and every student and there are teachers who keep them at arm's length, letting close only a chosen few. Me, I love them and let them go. I cried when my first batch of firsties left for middle school. Now, I think, I won't see them anymore unless they come back.

I think that some of his teachers are proud of him and his sacrifice for our country. Like me, they are patriotic. But maybe they are unlike me in that I am getting cynical about this need to be in another part of the world, policing them, when we have so many reasons to spend that energy, that time, and and that money here at home.

The money it cost to transport his body to the regional airport could have paid for tuition, books, and clothes to wear to an interview.

He wanted to be a teacher. And he can't come back.