by Aimee Ross
“Yeah, she is so right,” Corey agreed. “I think you have what they call ‘survivor’s guilt’? Where you made it through a horrible situation that someone else died in?”
“Yes, I suppose so, Corey. I have heard of that before. Hey, K.J., what do you think now? Does it make a little more sense? The guilt, the remorse, the sadness?”
“Yeah,” K.J. said, “I suppose.”
The serious tone of his words told me he was already thinking differently about the memoir.
“But the dude still needs to get over it! It was not his fault!”
The class erupted in laughter, releasing the tension our discussion had created. K.J. was good at knowing when to make a crack to lighten the mood, but I also sensed what he was trying to tell me. What the class was trying to tell me. In their polite and clear, not-so-subtle teenage way, they were telling me it was time to let go of my guilt. And coming from students about the same age as Strauss when he hit the girl on the bike, the same age as Zach who hit me, it might have been just what I needed.
• • •
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone raise her hand and motion me closer.
Kristyn.
Quiet and thoughtful, she was known by her classmates for being strong in her faith and mature beyond her years. Kristyn recently had gone through her own tragedy, losing her mother to a heart attack just days before school started last fall.
And now she was coming up with title ideas for her English teacher’s trauma narrative. I had explained my thesis manuscript to students, asking them for their thoughts. Teenagers had way more creativity than I.
Kristyn continued to sketch in her art notebook as I approached her desk. Drawing helped her focus, and she did it quite often during class. She looked up and smiled at me.
“Have you ever heard of the Japanese artwork called kint-something?” she asked.
I had given students the key ideas and significant imagery of the manuscript to focus on—reparation, scars, shattered, etc.—and then let them brainstorm. Anything would help. I just needed a jump start.
“Um, no, I don’t think so. What is it?”
“Oh shoot, I can’t remember exactly. I mean, I know what it is, I just can’t remember what it’s called,” she explained. “You should Google it. I think you might be interested in it.”
“Okay, then I will—got any idea how to spell it?”
I had no idea even where to begin.
“Try Japanese plus art plus k-i-n-t and see what comes up,” she said.
I was amazed at what Kristyn led me to.
The first entry to appear said kintsugi was a Japanese word meaning “golden joinery.” It was an art form that repaired something broken with seams of gold so that the mended work was even more valuable than before it broke.
Oh, my goodness. Kristyn was on to something.
According to one ceramics website, it is believed that kintsugi originated in the fifteenth century when a Japanese shogun broke his favorite bowl and tried to have it repaired by sending it back to China. Metal staples were used, which displeased the shogun, so he hired Japanese craftsmen to find a better answer. Their solution was kintsugi.
The reparation with gold seams of something broken. An art form. More beautiful than before. Kintsugi as metaphor. Yes.
I had never thought of myself and what had happened like that, but it might work for me. My life had shattered into pieces, too many to count. I had become scar upon scar upon scar. Some had faded, some had been revised, and some served as reminders. All cracked and then repaired.
I had been put back together, literally—my doctor told me so. I had also been resuscitated—resurrected and given a chance at a new life, as I had recently realized. So what if my restoration embraced the flaws, even the ones I had tried to cover up? And what if my breakage became a part of my history, rather than being forgotten or avoided?
I was honored that Kristyn had thought of this for me. Humbled.
Repaired and restored, I was starting to feel whole again. Maybe, like that broken bowl, I could be better than new. More valuable. Perhaps even a more beautiful version of the person I had been.
My students thought so—at least one, anyway. Someone going through her own reconstruction.
And that was enough for me.
The classroom had become the perfect environment—without my realizing it—for a type of therapy to occur. And because my students believed in me, they were able to guide me back to myself.
It all made so much sense once I recognized what had occurred.
Teaching gave me a purpose to be alive when I couldn’t understand why I was. Teaching provided the opportunity to share my story even while trying to make sense of it. Teaching and writing helped me beat PTSD while finding forgiveness and understanding for a young man whose entire life was ahead of him. Teaching allowed me to come full circle with the experience and to feel whole again.
My students, most around the same age of the young man who hit us that warm summer evening, did what doctors could not. They fixed what he had broken, and my wounds finally started to heal. They rescued me from danger and returned me to where I belonged.
Tragedies or trauma shouldn’t define you; what gives you purpose should.
That was it. My new mantra. My own little answer to existentialism.
Smathers Beach, Key West | Monday, June 23, 2014, 5:10 p.m.
There are two versions of the story, depending on which of us you talk to. My version involves asking Jackson to marry me on a dreary April school night after we had planned our late-June Florida vacation. He claims he asked me sitting on our back deck in front of an early-spring fire.
But neither matters.
Especially on our wedding day.
Jackson’s eyes, so honest and happy and full of love, matched the blue of the late-afternoon Caribbean sky as they looked into mine, moments before we promised to always find our home in each other’s arms. I was the blushing—okay, maybe sun-burned—bride, giddy to have that moment, to have him, and to finally be one hundred percent, completely and undeniably, in love.
It was just the two of us at our barefoot-in-the-sand wedding, besides the officiant, but we were all we needed. We were all we would ever need.
Jackson. Sigh. What a gift. He lit up my life with a sunshiny-ness that was just him, and he made me laugh endlessly. Everything was so easy with Jackson—maybe because we were so much alike. He pushed me to be a better person, because he already believed I was that version of myself.
Our love—a true love—filled whatever emptiness had been there before, and I knew we were meant for each other. We took care of each other, and we understood how easily the love holding us together could break if not tended to regularly. It was a perfect love, though realistic and mature.
And it was about damn time.
Jackson’s first kiss—from that night almost two years ago—marked me for life. I knew then I would be his forever. And when you know, you know.
So it only made sense that once our vows were said and wedding-on-the-beach-in-Key-West photographs taken, we’d hop on our scooter and ride off into the Florida sunset together for our own real-life happily ever after.
And that’s just what we did.
August 2014
I swiped my key card and pulled the heavy brown metal door of the school building toward me. The vacuum created lifted my perfectly placed hair as I entered, and I wondered if the humidity of the non-air-conditioned, fifty-year-old building would be my hair’s next saboteur.
I also wondered if my deodorant would hold out. The open house wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes, and the building was nothing less than sweltering in the mid-August heat.
As I unlocked and opened the door to my classroom, I caught sight of t
he sheet just next to it, printed in bold, black font, announcing whose room this was. The secretary had remembered.
Mrs. Aimee Ross, it said. My married name. For years, I had been called the other name—well-known in this small town—by students and parents and colleagues. For years, I had worked hard to earn recognition and titles and awards for that other name. And now, after almost a quarter century, it was different. My new name. So strange.
“Uh, Mrs. Ross?” the nasally pinched voice of a stuffed-up teenaged boy asked.
I turned to see who had walked into the room, and I recognized him. He’d been in my study hall a few years back.
“Hi, Shawn,” I said. “Looking for Room 110? You’re in the right place.”
He looked up from studying his schedule, his face an inch from the paper, and then with the push of a finger readjusted the glasses slipping down his nose.
“Oooooooh, it’s still you,” he said.
Still me. Ha! If he only knew.
I was nowhere close to being the me I had once been. The past four and a half years of my life had caused a metamorphosis of sorts, one in which, more than anything, I had gained a certain wisdom about life: It could not be controlled.
You could make your own choices, maybe even set goals or a direction, you could even try to guide it, but most of the time, that would be knocked out of your hands without any notice at all. Sometimes you could get that control back right away, but other times—in fact, a lot of the time—you just had to wait. And either way, you could control only yourself—your own actions and reactions—no one or nothing else’s, because the reality is that life, no matter who’s writing the story, just happens.
And it’s short. Holy shit, is it short.
But whether you plow straight ahead or falter, you make your way through, dealing with whatever it is, being as strong as you can, taking one moment at a time. That’s all you can do.
And here I was, back in the place I belonged, my second home, feeling more grounded and happier than I ever had before. My heart had mended, my body had healed, and my soul had finally settled.
No, I was definitely not “still me.”
But Room 110’s English teacher, no matter her name, was—technically.
I laughed.
“Yep, it’s still me!” I said. “Were you confused?”
“Well, my schedule said I had this one teacher for English 12, but she was also my teacher in fifth grade. I thought maybe she moved up a few grades or something,” he said and shrugged.
I laughed again. Teenagers: my people.
“Nope, it’s still me, still my room,” I said. “Just a different name.”
“Ah, gotcha,” Shawn said. “I just wanted to check. See you in a couple days!”
And with that, he was gone.
Shawn was my only visitor for open house that night, but that was okay.
The excitement of a brand-new school year with my brand-new name had filled the air of Room 110—the same old classroom it had always been—with a bit of electricity. The same old classroom where I would continue to make my permanent mark.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
And now—finally—I was exactly who I was supposed to be.
Yes, I was still the same old crazy English teacher/Holocaust lady/aspiring writer in love with Ricky Martin—I was still me.
But this me understood her breakage.
And this me embraced her flaws.
Because this me, more worn, more authentic, and more valuable, was illuminated with veins of gold.
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
~Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
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Epilogue
So.
It turns out that you can be the author of your own life story.
It also turns out that in writing your story, you could be providing yourself the therapy necessary to feel whole again.
According to Dr. James Pennebaker, a pioneer in studying the healing nature of writing, expressing what happened to you through words on a page allows you to organize and understand your experiences and yourself. This, in turn, provides a sense of control, something you most likely lacked during the traumatic event(s) that led you to need to heal in the first place. When the writer has given the traumatic experience a structure and meaning, not only are the emotions drawn from the experience more manageable, but the story most likely then has a resolution, or ending, which eases the trauma.
The process worked for me.
I am no longer a character in that old, sad story, defined by trauma, because writing healed me. Writing also gave voice to wisdom I’d gained: Life can change, or even end, in a moment. That’s just the way it is. And you can hide in fear and avoidance, withering away until death, or you can attempt to live with courage, one challenge at a time, accepting each moment gracefully.
I came to redefine my trauma narrative as a healing one, hoping that others could take inspiration from me in some way.
I just never expected my mom would be the first.
• • •
“You’re always so happy, Aimee,” Mom says from her cornflower blue La-Z-Boy, a TV tray with toilet paper and potty chair to her right, a table lamp with People magazines and her iPhone on the left. “I want what you’re having.”
I am gathering Christmas ornaments and decorations the kids and I put up for her and Dad at Thanksgiving while chattering away about nothing to keep her mind busy. As I collect them, I lay them gently on the living room carpet so Mom can direct me to their correct storage boxes, even from her chair. Dad and Jackson are somewhere outside, taking down lights.
“You mean, Prozac?” I joke, and she laughs.
She needs to laugh. I know she is scared, depressed even, awaiting her next chemo treatment. Twenty years ago, she battled uterine cancer, but she’s stayed cancer-free ever since, a miracle. Three months before Christmas, she was diagnosed with cancer again: Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
“No, really, Mom,” I insist. “The Prozac helps—you should talk to your doctor about it—but you know it’s more than that for me.”
I wink at her, and she grins back. We both know there is more to my happiness than Prozac, and his name is Jackson. Mom loves him, too.
“But how did you stay so positive during everything you went through?” she asks.
This takes me by surprise. Positive? That’s not the way I remember it. Maybe because I was living it, not observing, like she was. Now, the roles are reversed, and Mom wants to draw strength from me, just as I had from her in the months after the accident. She needs inspiration. Maybe even a pep talk of sorts.
“You know, it’s funny, Mom. I had someone ask me one time how it had felt fighting for my life, and I just didn’t have a good answer. Same as now.”
I continue wrapping fragile ornaments in paper and delicately placing them in their boxes while I mull over her question. Mom watches, calling out every so often which container goes with what decoration.
What a cop-out, I think. That’s not what she wants to hear. Yes, the passage of time and self-reflection have given me perspective on my experiences, but how could what I had gone through help her? She had already beaten cancer once before.
But it’s the least I can do for her now.
“I mean, at the time, I didn’t know I was fighting for my life. I was just doing what everyone told me to do. I think it’s the same with what you’re asking me. I don’t remember being positive, Mom. I can’t lie. But no matter how much I didn’t want it happening to me, and no matter how much I though
t, ‘This isn’t the way my life is supposed to go,’ it still did. And I just didn’t see any other alternative than to deal with it as it came at me.”
No real mystery, I guess, just life. And strength, I think, even though its source isn’t always clear.
“Maybe it’s having enough strength to see—to hope—beyond the moment?”
Mom sighs.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess you’re right. I’m trying, Aimee. I really am.”
And I know she is.
“It’s just”—her voice breaks—“hard.” She lowers her head into her hands, now crying through the fingertips framing her face, and says, “I don’t want to die.”
But I know she already is.
All I can say is, “I know, Mom. I know. No one does.”
Five months later, when Mom initiates a conversation with me about mortality, I fold myself up beside her in bed and hold her hand. What’s left of her hair, after months of intense chemotherapy, has turned into a patchwork of cottony soft tufts, and she can only lie in one position, her head against a pillow on her right side. Mostly she just listens during our “discussion,” sometimes smiling, sometimes murmuring an “mmmmm-hmmmm” as I ramble on, not really sure of what to say. Time and grief have clouded the memory, but I think I tell her that when faced with death, I’d been okay with it. That I hadn’t been afraid. I think I tell her she shouldn’t be either. And I know I am stroking her arm, just like she often did for me, whether after the accident or ill as a child, to let me know that she was there.
We are quiet then, together but alone in that space, while a surreal awareness envelops us: Her death is imminent.
• • •
In the months after Mom’s passing, I realize why I need to share my story—why we have to share our stories—with others. For understanding. For comfort.
Because others’ stories not only help us to find meaning in our own chaos, they help us to understand our own emotions. Stories can even keep our loved ones alive—and with us—through our shared history or memories, because for those moments of retelling, time collapses, and the past can be present.