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No wait, don't go ... Please Stay by Jimmy Patterson
It wasn't until I turned 19 or 20 when I first experienced the
death of a friend. It was 1979. Kurt turned up the space heater in
his dorm room, laid down on his bed and fell asleep. He never woke
up, having suffocated as gas filled his small room.
Mrs. P was 19, too, when the same thing happened to her. One of
her friends drove into a brick wall one night.
Though it's been oer 20 years, I still remember having difficulty
accepting the news of my friend's death, even though we were never
particularly close. We hung out with different sets of people, but
occasionally, another friend and I would hop into Kurt's 1940-era
black sedan and cruise the Sonic in Irving on a Friday night.
As painful as it was to bear the news of Kurt's death at the age
of 19, it doesn't at all qualify me to understand what our 14-year-
old daughter and many of her friends are going through these days.
Last Thursday, word came that a classmate, a trombone player in their
junior high band, had accidentally shot and killed himself.
Imagine.
Imagine being 14 and having someone you see every day of your
life just instantly not be there anymore. The boy was at school the
day he died. He was, his friends said, his usual lively self. He
talked with a few friends after school, then walked home -- and two
hours later he was dead. And he was just 13.
The phone at our house rang all night long. One call after
another came, as young teenagers tried to understand what was
happening, all of them failing miserably. My daughter said it was
hard to hear all of her friends cry, especially the boys. Mrs. P and
I do know that feeling: It was difficult to watch tears flood our
daughter's face for four hours until she finally cried herself to
sleep.
Two days before their classmate died, my daughter and the rest of
the kids in her junior high band scored the highest marks possible at
their University Interscholastic League band contest. A 'one' in
concert and a 'one' in sightreading. Not an easy task, proved by the
fact that the school's two bands were the only two among 18 at the
contest to accomplish the feat. The kids were absolutely elated upon
hearing news of their accomplishments from the judges. When you're a
band kid, there is no better feeling than to hear a judge say you've
made a 'one.'
Forty-eight hours later -- after these 125-plus teenage musicians
were, quite simply, on top of the world -- they were suddenly forced
to deal with the complicated emotions that death brings. It is the
most radical swing in emotions imaginable.
Before the night was over, the entire gamut of emotions
experienced by our daughter had been run: sadness, anger, guilt, you
name it. Anything that had nothing to do with happy spilled from her
-- and the other kids in her circle of friends.
Mrs. P and I wondered aloud: How do you handle a situation with
which you have no experience? How do you teach one of life's hardest
lessons if you haven't experienced it yourself? Not every 14-year-old
has dealt with this sort of tragedy. As parents, we hadn't.
Is it OK to say "Everything's going to be OK" while you hug your
kid tightly all night? No, of course not. Everything's NOT going to
be OK when you're 14 and someone you see everyday at school is dead.
Everything is not going to be OK as you try to make your teenager
understand it's not God's fault that the boy died too early a death.
Everything is not OK when a 14-year-old tries to make sense of the
fact that not only has this boy died too early, but so, too, did his
father -- last December, of cancer, and his grandfather, just two
days ago.
We told our daughter that the boy is in a better place, realizing
that she's probably not ready to hear that either until some of the
shock wears off.
Our daughter was not particularly close to the boy who died. But
she saw him every day, spoke to him frequently and had several honors
classes with him. I saw him the night of the band contest last week.
I smiled at him, he smiled back. He was a good kid.
One of the predominant emotions our daughter is dealing with is
guilt. Guilt that she never tried to be a better friend to him.
Throughout the night as the news came, our daughter talked about
how she should have talked to him more; how she could've done more.
How nice he was. How good a kid he was. How bad she felt for him
because he had lost both his dad and his grandfather in such a short
time. And then the talk shifted to feelings for the boy's mother, who
had lost a husband, a father and a son in the painfully brief span of
four months. We encouraged our daughter to pray for the boy's mother.
A neighbor whose son was a close friend said the day the boy
died, he came up to her car after school and chatted about how he was
going to try out for football next year. He was planning his future.
He HAD a future. Two hours later he was dead.
Whether he died accidentally or for some other reason, it really
makes little difference to the remaining teenagers who are all
experiencing the death of one of their own. All they know is that a
friend, an acquaintance, a classmate, a good kid, is dead. And they
didn't get a chance to say goodbye. They didn't get a chance to say,
'No, don't go. Please stay.'
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