this has not been a good year.
So let's see...we're two months and four days into 2012.
So far, I've attended a funeral after seraphprowess's dad died suddenly. And I've tried to be there for her as much as possible in all of that aftermath. I've just tried to be supportive because I know if that happened to me, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed for days. Liz is so much stronger than she realizes, being able to handle everything that was going on at the funeral with her family.
Then, we were coasting well through February. February was good. We didn't really have anything bad happen in February.
Now we have March. If any of you were watching the Weather Channel on Friday, no, none of the tornadoes were really close to here. I was driving down out of Indy and I'm fairly sure I saw the wall cloud that hit Henryville. You couldn't miss this thing. It was HUGE. Once again, I find myself living in a place where I don't know anyone with a basement. Kerry and I's current plan of action if we are home and in a tornado warning is to go down to the lowest level and crouch under the stairs.
Anyway, shortly after we got back from this conference in Indianapolis, I saw a weird message from Lucy, one of the Asians in our program, about Tom. I thought it was a practical joke. Maybe it was a different Tom? I had no idea until a few hours later, when word started circulating around Facebook and Twitter. It was our Tom. He had gone home after giving a presentation on Thursday, fallen asleep and never woke up.
This is not supposed to happen to people our age. They found him when he didn't show up for an intramural game on Friday. They have no idea, as of right now, of what caused his death, but he seemed perfectly healthy.
In a weird way, this has brought us closer as a group. Most of us in the last few days have started friended everyone on Twitter and Facebook. We are a fairly close-knit group...there's only 30 or so of us. It's not like being an undergrad, where you're in a lecture with 500 other people and you literally see thousands of people on campus every day. Because most of our classes are at night, the only people we see are the 15-20 people in our classes and our professors. At the beginning, we were really distant with each other, but now we've gotten to where we're always joking around with each other in class. So it's just weird that that number has now gone down by one.
No clue if we're going to have any sort of memorial service here for him (or if just ends up that someone passes the word that we're having a wake at Kilroy's for Tom and everyone come, which knowing this group, might happen).
A few years ago, I started reconnecting with people from Hereford, where I went to grades 1-6 in, on Facebook. I was able to find two girls that I had played softball with. Their mother was my favorite teacher EVER.
Mrs. Fortenberry was, to put it mildly, awesome. She was my third-grade teacher and she was one of the first people to really make me feel special at school, because I hadn't really gotten along with my second-grade teacher. Mrs. Fortenberry was forever recommending me books to read and really got me into reading. I mean, I loved to read before I got her as a teacher, but I had always felt odd because no one else in my family read. My family was always making fun of the stash of books that I took with me everywhere, but Mrs. Fortenberry made me realize that wanting to read books was nothing to be ashamed of.
In fact, I remember when I won an award that year...I think it was for most number of AR points. The prize was a book and Mrs. Fortenberry told my mom, "Do they realize that they're giving a book to a girl who has her own library?"
Mrs. Fortenberry died from breast cancer this morning.
She was amazing and she was a fighter and my life was better for having known her.
I still remember my last day of third grade. Mrs. Fortenberry was obsessed with the Wizard of Oz. (I always brought her back little WoO trinkets when we came back from visiting family members in Kansas. Lapel pins or little red heel paperweights or whatever.) So after we had gotten done doing our rehearsal for our third-grade graduation ceremony (I'm really not kidding), we went back to the room. All of the desks had been pushed out into the hallway and when we walked in, she had transformed the classroom into an airplane so we could "fly" to Oz. And she had in-flight snacks of popcorn and trail mix and fruit punch. And I remember her describing Oz to us and saying how everyone's Oz was their own and you could make your Oz, your perfect place, your utopia, whatever you wanted it to be. She had us draw our own personal Oz (but in third grade, my Oz was wherever there was an unlimited supply of books and my dog to play with).
Having gone through three different school districts, having a bunch of middling teachers that really didn't act like they cared about their students, having some teachers that were just downright awful, having some that were okay, you tend to remember the few that were absolutely exemplary. Mrs. Fortenberry was EXEMPLARY. She's literally the top of the list (and I posted this on Facebook and I hope none of the high school teachers I had get offended when I say that she was the best teacher I had.) because she set the foundation for the rest of my academic career, which, in my opinion, is the time when you really need the best teachers. If you don't start out strong, you'll never finish strong.
We need more teachers like her.
So I mourn her, not only for her daughters or for the fact that she did impact me in such a way and left such a mark on me, but for the children who will never have her as a teacher and realize how amazing she was. I hope that there are more people who get into teaching because they love it and they want to make an impact on children and make them want to succeed the way Mrs. Fortenberry made me want to succeed and want to be a better person and a better student.
And, for the last time, if you love someone, you should tell them. If you miss someone, you should tell them. Because you honestly never know when your number is up (or their number is up) and spending all of this time, wasting away with words unsaid, is absolutely no way to live this life.