Rachel Perry

I often have trouble remembering names, a serious shortcoming for a teacher. Kids pass me in the hall, say 'Hi, Mr. Clark!' and are gone long before my rusty retrieval systems can bring up a name. Oddly, though, the first thing that flashes into my head when one of those familiar but nameless faces goes by is something he or she wrote for me. 'Cowboy boots,' I think every time one girl goes by, recalling a poem she wrote about coming here from Texas .

So when I read of Rachel Perry's death from meningitis last month, my first thought was of a nameless poem she wrote in my Creative Writing class last year. Ironically, it was about a funeral:

You looked different.
It wasn't you who lay there.
I stood there watching you:
Your skin was yellow.
Your hair was nicely combed.
I was scared. The line was getting longer but
I wasn't ready to move on.

Rachel is the first of my students to die, a sad milepost. There will be others. Joan O'Donnell, who retired last year, told me Rachel was the 32nd student she's outlived since 1980. 'There were times when I was just relieved to get through a school year without anyone dying,' she said.

I didn't know Rachel well. She was a quiet girl who wrote quiet poems. She graduated from ConVal last year and, according to her family, was saving money to go to college. She liked shopping and decorating and hard core music. She pictured herself working with children.

One of the most heartwrenching things about the deaths of young people is the briefness of their obituaries -- no career highlights, no bowling leagues, no marriages, no children or grandchildren -- nothing but dreams. They haven't had time for anything else.

A couple of weeks ago, just before vacation, I asked the students in my Modern Literature class to create maps of their lives, from birth to death. It's an assignment related to Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a man learns from alien kidnappers to see all of his life as a single picture, a mountain range of joys and griefs, triumphs and disasters. Time is irrelevant and death is just one moment out of millions, each one existing forever.

It's a project most kids love to do, once they get over the initial creepiness of forecasting the moment and method of their own demise. They make up elaborate fantasies of wealth and fame: they marry movie stars, they become movie stars! One girl, whose past has been grim, got so excited about her future that she had to add paper to the top of her map to make room for her ecstatic visions.

Teachers have fantasies, too. 'I touch the future,' the bumper sticker reads. 'I teach.' But when Rachel's future was lost, so was a part of my own, in which she writes glorious poetry, wins Pulitzers, and perhaps teaches other young people how to make their dreams come true. Any pain I feel at the death of Rachel Perry is nothing compared to that of her family and friends, of course. But it is real.