- Write about going back to school after summer vacation.
I was 11 going into 7th grade. Young, yes but I started kindergarten at 4 so that would place me in 7th grade at 11. Seventh grade was the start of middle school, a large middle school where I would get lost in the crowd.
My “What I Did During Summer Vacation” story was probably not like any of my fellow students. Mid summer I attended the funeral for my father. My dad had a fatal heart attack at the age of 41. I was visiting cousins in Massachusetts at the time so my last memory of him was two weeks prior at the airport. Having just watched my stepfather die I think that it was a blessing that I did not see my father pass.
Some six weeks after my father’s death I started school. A few of the kids from my elementary school knew what had happened but for the most part I was alone in my grief. I don’t remember having a “poor me” attitude I just plugged along, my mother’s strength was my guidance.
During a morning class the teacher had us fill out cards with our information and parents contact information. The teacher said “If your parent is deceased then write ‘deceased'”. I felt a friend look at me, may have been my imagination though. I wasn’t certain how to spell “deceased” and didn’t want to raise my hand to ask so I wrote “dead”. That was a knife through me and I had to fight back tears for the rest of the class. I also panicked thinking about the teacher asking me details, of course it never happened but I was entitled to my fear.
Later that day another teacher had us fill out the same information. I took a deep breath as I prepared to fill out the form. The teacher went through the same speech but added “If you have no father write ‘No father”. I wrote “No father”, somehow that hurt less.
A few weeks later my mom asked my siblings and I if our teachers knew that we recently lost a parent. I told her about filling out the cards. She was upset that I wrote no father. “You have a father, he just died”, she said. I couldn’t explain that it hurt to write dead, and also that I couldn’t spell “deceased”.
I laugh about it now but I wish that I could have told my teachers the truth. I had one teacher ask me why I didn’t finish a project. Well, I didn’t want to burden my suddenly-widowed mom to help me. Of course she would have helped but I felt like a burden at the time.
I think that now there is more guidance, therapy was not the norm back then. There is so much more that I needed at the time and I didn’t know it.
Introverted runner and other stuff 