The first homework our English teacher set us at secondary school was to write a short essay jauntily entitled “The Day That Changed My Life”. Among various 12-year-olds’ accounts of finding medieval coins on a beach and performing a clarinet solo on a skiing holiday, I wrote five pages on the death of my father two years previously. I hadn’t written about it before, hadn’t really spoken much about it, and was a little disappointed when, in his comments at the end of the piece, my teacher explained that he had demurred from giving it a mark. It felt wrong, he wrote, to be examining such a topic with too critical an eye.
I didn’t agree. It had felt fantastic to write it, to see the most significant event of my young life given shape, structure, even story, however inelegantly. I had wanted to know how it made other people feel. Maybe it would spark a dialogue with my new classmates. Instead it felt like my teacher had turned away from the messiness of it all, leaving me further stranded in that remote emotional cottage-in-the-woods where all young bereaved people find themselves. I also knew, though, that he was trying to be kind. And that if he had put a red pen through my description of my family’s howls of pain by the sitting room windows and scribbled “Get to the point!” in the margin, I might have asked to change schools. That’s the problem with people in grief. Can’t do right for doing wrong.
