Bad News In Threes

Today, in the very early morning, I received an email about how one of my former students died.

Naturally, this led me to post cryptic depressed messages on Twitter, jump to a conclusion about something I heard, discover in my other emails that a deadline has shifted and generally turn into an echinoderm with a migrane. Sorry to people who got caught in the cross-fire of it all. Leads me to snap decisions and to over-react. To think that ‘bad things happen in threes’, when I know that my mind is just selecting things – and misrepresenting the bad even.

The student in question was an example of a quasi-response to ‘bad luck happening in threes’. Since I had three things happen to me in succession (the news, a wrongful assumption and the deadline), it kind of clicked with a little more… resonance? … than usual.

There were once three children, who attended a school, with about three to two years difference between them. Within one year, the two eldest were diagnosed with a mental illness. One of them ended up leaving the institution, having a child and lost contact with the family altogether. The other sought alternative schooling elsewhere and eventually settled into a care facility.

I remember the youngest child. That child was in my Year 10 English class.

One of the dumbest things that administration can do is leave squiggles and symbols on the class attendance list. Because teachers are busy, distracted people and will leave such things on their desk, on the floor, on the bookshelf and I would usually photocopy it and leave it on the pinboard behind my desk so I could have a quick reference early in the year when I was still learning students’ names.

The squiggles were usually wrongly placed anyway. Columns would shift, a new name would be added to a class and the whole thing would go out of wack. A cross sometimes meant ‘there’s a medical record for this particular student’. Another squiggle might mean (since it wasn’t accurate) they were a boarder or had an alternative address for mail-outs or parent contact; there might be another symbol to show that they had siblings in the same year (’don’t confuse X and Y!’) – and more often than not someone would have put them into the wrong damned place anyway and you’d be checking with the school nurse to discover that student Z was an only child, fit as a proverbial violin and was in fact the daughter of your doctor.

[Word to any medical professionals out there, by the way. If you are my doctor and I happen to park my car near your house every day for work, it is NOT okay to leave a note under my windshield asking when I'm coming in for my next round of vaccinations. You're very sweet, and I'm incredibly appreciative that you care that much about my health check-ups, but it sodding freaks me out. And don't say that I'm incredibly lucky that you weren't my gynecologist leaving notes, because that's not funny either.]

I should point out that we didn’t refer to it for an accurate record in these cases anyway (I mean, why would you?) – we would have regular meetings with the Year head or the Counsellors who would allow us access as needed to the correct information and it would be confidential. But it didn’t seem to stop the printer in the front office merrily churning out blobs and wiggles next to names, sending the secretaries bonkers.

So, this youngest child, in the highly-observant fashion of all young people (’Miss, we saw you in Fremantle last Sunday around 9am with an almond biscuit and a double-shot Caffè macchiato heading for the fringe festival screening of ‘Hotaru no Haka‘ and don’t you think that you should do something about your hair when you’re out with a guy?’) noticed the attendance roll with the squiggles and things.

Their friend asked the question – ‘Why are there things next to our names?’

Me: ‘Huh?’

Friend: ‘There’s signs. Next to our names. I have a box and X has a cross. What does that mean?’

Me: ‘Oh, they’re like medic alerts and stuff, like when you wear one of those silver bracelets telling us you’ve got diabetes and stuff, but it’s not an accurate list. I should get it updated, mutter, mutter, etc, etc.’

X: ‘What sort of medical stuff?’

Me: ‘Well, I guess things like…’

X: ‘Like schizophrenia?’

Me: ‘No. That’s not what it’s for.’

Which was true. That sort of information was on a need-to-know basis. Teachers were expected to know about cases like diabetics, anaphylaxis, epilepsy and what to do. Particularly for some cases, where there would be a photo of the child in the staff room with ‘what to do’, that would be given to those class teachers.

Anything more sensitive than that certainly wasn’t put on a class list – nor would it really be registered in the same ‘category’. But the bloody stupid squiggles could certainly lead any reasonable person to think that maybe there was something that I was being told that had a certain impact on how they were regarded. Life threatening conditions is one thing.

People don’t like being talked about behind their backs, if they are particularly sensitive, had a prior nasty experience, et al. And people jump to conclusions, wrongly. Only human. So, I could understand why X was a little on edge. If there’s one thing that I hate, its the word ‘crazy‘ being bandied around as a judgmental term and how people don’t get all sides of the story. Maybe that’s just me being oversensitive, but eh.

X: ‘Why not?’

Me: ‘…Well, funnily enough, I’m doing my Psych studies part time and I have my course book over there on the table. Do you want to know more about what schizophrenia is and what it involves? I mean, if you’re interested.’

X: ‘Oh. Really? Okay.’

Friend: ‘What’s schisozophenywhat?’

X: [marching straight to my desk and seizing the book] ‘Page 242.’

Friend: ‘Like biopolar? My uncle has that. Or is it different….’

I later had a parent/teacher meeting with that child’s parents. They were polite, keen, happy that was teaching this and that… and the topic of what X brought up in class wasn’t raised. They were lovely. But oddly sad. I found out that X had recently moved to residential accomodation and they were settling in happily and made some friends.

Not because of any problems. But because the parents were so scared that their two previous children suffered an illness, that they blamed themselves in some way. And thought that X would be better not living with them, because they were terrified that there was something that ‘they did’. Yet they knew the research on mental illness, knew that it was not ‘one factor’. They are decent, kind, intelligent people – and circumstances can just be a real bitch sometimes.

They gave up their child for three years, because they thought it was for the best. I really can’t stress enough that they were well-regarded by the community and that they did the best for all of their children. But the fear of a third child being somehow… influenced… led them to take this step. I couldn’t imagine with all honesty, how desparing that must have felt for them.

X graduated, was very successful with their final results. Their natural curiosity and no-nonsense approach that I got to know that year, led them to a career in the sciences – not health sciences, but chemistry. They went to the same university that I did. We never met during the time I was doing my M.Ed there, but then I was on a different side of the campus and I never did any of the social clubs or whatever.

Today, I learned of their death, a car accident. It happened in an email, an aside amongst a smattering of information of ’so and so is doing this and such and such is happening’. I’m thinking of their parents, were very straight-forward people who did not adhere to superstitions, who worked to inform themselves and do the best they could under extremely trying circumstances. The loss of a child.

And yet ‘misfortune comes in threes‘ still bugs me – even after everything I know.

Tagged as: luck, mental health, Science, teaching