I Wanted a Teacher's Funeral

Of all the reasons I decided to become a teacher, the most macabre was this: I wanted a teacher's funeral.

This was the result of attending the funeral for John Sullivan, a long-time Conval High School English teacher who was killed in a bicycle accident the spring before I joined the faculty. The church was filled to overflowing with young people, students and former students of the tall, spare man with the wicked sense of humor who taught them about semi-colons, sonnets, and Scott Fitzgerald. He taught them more than that, of course: Who would grieve over a semi-colon?

I didn't know John, but my cubicle in the English office was once his. Ruth Ring, now retired, had the cubicle next to mine and helped me survive that hellish first year. She told me how John and Bob Fay, also now retired, used to play a game involving code numbers for jokes. For example, John would look over at Bob and say, "433!" Bob would guffaw and reply, "37!", and John would double over. Ruth told me she once tried to get in on the act by singing out "477!" John and Bob looked at her, stone-faced, and then John turned to Bob and said, "Some people just don't know how to tell a joke."

Many of those at his funeral mentioned John's sense of humor, his fondness for puns, his gentle humanity. I looked around all those people and thought: Look at the lives he touched. Look at the difference he made. I edit a magazine that reaches two million readers. When I die, how many of them will weep for me? What difference have I made?

On September 21, I went to another memorial service, this one for my friend Bob LeBlanc, a UNH geography professor who was on United 175 that awful day in New York City. The Johnson Theater was nearly full, but there weren't many of his students. They were where Bob had inspired them to go, scattered across the globe, studying distant places and distant cultures, pursuing careers ? pursuing lives -- in what Bob called "human geography." When the news of Bob's death found them, they sent a flood of e-mails back to remember and honor him. At one point, said Dean Marilyn Hoskin, e-mails about Bob were reaching the university website at a rate of one every 20 seconds.

One of them ended this way: "If any current UNH students are reading this, if you are struggling in a class and need help, go to your professor and talk to him or her. If you are lucky enough to have a teacher like Bob LeBlanc, you might just get that one tip, that one insight, that will make it easier to succeed. You might learn something you will remember for the rest of your life."    

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