Kids saying good-bye, and a man waiting to die.

My class recently had a teacher candidate come for a three-week observation practicum. Translation: a lady who is in teacher’s college right now came to see what it is like in a real classroom. This was just her first practicum. She was only to observe and help out when asked. She didn’t need to write lesson plans, or practice teaching the class. She will do that later in her course of studies. And I hope that she will do that with a more experienced teacher than me. I was happy to have another adult in the room to help. But I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that level of teacher training.

She was great, the teacher candidate. She bought in, right from day one. She was engaged with the kids. She was focused on learning as much as possible. And she helped me out a lot. It was so nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Every elementary teacher in Ontario gets a 40-minute preparation and planning period every day. That means that we get a break from our students so that we can get other stuff done. My Kindergarten colleagues and I all have our prep period at the same time, with the idea that we will collaborate and plan lessons together. In reality, it doesn’t happen much. We are often busy doing stuff that is specific to our class. For example, I might be busy getting signatures for a field trip form, or talking to the vice principal about how to handle an incident of student violence. But even if my Kinder colleagues and I were all free at the same time, I don’t know how much we would collaborate. Our styles are very different and what works for one won’t necessarily work for another. My ECE teaching partner and I are usually on the same page. But we are always busy, and we don’t get planning time together.

Working with the teacher candidate was the truest experience of collaboration that I have had as a teacher. Why? She didn’t have other responsibilities to pre-occupy her. And she wasn’t set in her ways. Every day I told her what I was hoping to accomplish, (e.g. A unit on 3D shapes) and then she helped me plan a course of action. With her help, I had the most productive three weeks that I have had as a teacher. They weren’t perfect. Some of our ideas didn’t work out as well as we had hoped. But that will always be true. I was happy to be trying new things and seeing how they go. After all, that is how we learn.

At the end of her three-week practicum, I told the students that the teacher candidate would be leaving us. The students all ran to hug her. I had to guide them into making a line and tell them to move out of the way after hugging her so that someone else could hug. I have experienced being group hugged by kindergarteners and I know that, when you reach a certain number of simultaneous huggers, it stops being fun and starts being dangerous. I have almost fallen over from too many leg huggers.

At dismissal time, two kids seemed particularly sad to be saying goodbye to the teacher candidate. One little girl didn’t want to stop hugging her, even as the little girl’s mom stood at the gate waiting to take her home. After all the kids had left, and before we said our goodbye, the teacher candidate told me that she was at peace with her desire to teach Kindergarten. The three weeks in our class had affirmed for her that Kinder is where she belongs. Hopefully that works out for her. She might have to teach other grades for a while, too. You have to take the jobs that are available. It takes years to get the seniority required to choose your grade level.

Seeing the sad hugs at the end of the day made me think of all the goodbyes I have had to say in my life. It is nearing the end of the school year, so there are a lot more goodbyes coming up for me. I will be moving schools, as I don’t have the seniority required to stay where I am.

Out of all the results of my “group hug” Google search, I liked this one the best.

Sometimes I think about friends and/or friendships that I have lost. As a Friar, I had many great friendships based on deep and honest conversations about faith. I remember many people being moved to tears as we talked about God, and their own struggle to accept themselves. There were many people who opened up to me at every stop of my journey. I connected easily with a lot of people. In my first year with the Friars, I signed up with a local volunteer organization that acted as a central hub to connect volunteers to people in need in the community. The coordinator saw that I had social skills, so she paired me up with a guy in a nursing home who needed a friend. The guy was famously cantankerous. He had fallen ill with ALS at a relatively young age and was stuck in a nursing home, unable to move anything below his neck. That is a good reason to be cantankerous. He was at least 20 years younger than everyone else there, and he was probably the only resident who had his full, undiminished mental capacity. So, he had good reason to be lonely. He was divorced, although his ex-wife visited from time to time. He had a daughter who visited more frequently, thank God. But time passed slowly for him in that condition and in that situation.

Another one of the first year Friars already wanted to volunteer at the nursing home, so we both signed up to be volunteers and we started spending a lot of time there. I paid the man a visit and we quickly became good friends. Sure, I was a volunteer, but our friendship was real. I not only felt great compassion for the man. (He was in constant pain. His nerves had lost their ability to control movement, but they retained their ability to send pain signals. His legs were constantly cramping and his feet were extremely sensitive.) But I genuinely related to him in many ways. He had been a business owner, just like myself. He had been a bit of a loner, much like I had been for a long time. We understood each other. He had a lot of reasons to be angry, chief among them was his contempt for the nursing home food. He could not stand the food there. He had his daughter bring him in plastic containers full of pre-cooked hamburgers which he would microwave. And I started bringing in Chinese food one night each week. On Sunday or Monday nights we would eat Chinese food and watch football. I imagine that, on those evenings, he felt almost normal. The other first-year Friar always joined us. Together we had a little “guys night” in the nursing home.

The coordinator of volunteers at the nursing home told me, before I took the job, that the man had already signed up for medical assistance in dying (MAID) and that I was not allowed to try to dissuade him. So, when it eventually came up in conversation, I did not try to convince him to do otherwise. Back at the Friary, the full-fledged Friars (most of them were priests) asked me if I was going to try to talk him out of it, citing religious reasons. I told them that I could not. And, deep down, I was very thankful for that. I didn’t want to have to pronounce judgement over something so complex. That was between the man and God. Now that I have given away the end of the story, and seeing that this happened a long time ago, I am going to call him Gary. Gary was a good friend of mine, and a good man. He had dictated an angry letter or two in his day. But all the nursing home staff agreed that he had a heart of gold and was a gentle soul.

As the date of his MAID appointment neared, Gary and I spoke more about death. He told me that he hoped there was something on the other side. He hoped that God was real. He didn’t have any fear of meeting God. Gary accepted who he was, and how he had lived. Deep down he accepted his suffering. Gary told me about the times in his when he had been overly head-strong, competitive, and selfish. He admitted he relished hurting people on the football field as a teenager. Gary knew who he was and who he wasn’t. And, deep down, he was starting to understand the good and compassionate heart of God.

Gary and I were guy friends. He didn’t show all his vulnerability to me. But he was very close with some of the care workers in the nursing home. One of them told me, in confidence that, close to the end, Gary felt that God was forgiving him and welcoming him. He felt loved. He was at peace. He was even crying tears of sweet relief.

When the day of his MAID appointment arrived, it was I who wheeled Gary from his room to the front door where an accessible bus was waiting to take him to the MAID site. They couldn’t do it in his nursing home. He had to go to a larger care facility. His ex-wife, his children, and their families would be there with him. I wasn’t going there. It was only for family. But I was honored that Gary (and the care workers) let me take him for his last ride in the nursing home. His last words to me were “Thank you for everything.” He was crying. I got the sense that he wanted to say more. After a little reception in the dining room, I wheeled Gary to the door. The driver of the accessible bus backed his chair onto the lift, and Gary started going up. As his chair rolled backwards into the bus and the doors started to close, we looked at each other. He opened his mouth to say something. I gave him a kind-of casual, friendly salute. He closed his mouth, nodded and smiled. Enough said.

Gary was a good friend. He was not, nor had he ever been a perfect man. But he was honest and sincere. Sure, I listened to him vent his anger about everything. But he also listened to me. He was a counsellor to me, in many ways. Our friendship was balanced. I wasn’t a high and mighty volunteer, stooping down to help him in his lowliness. We were just two friends, trying to make the best of a tough situation.

Gary is just one of the many people I have had to say goodbye to in my life. Some have died. Some I have lost contact with as I moved away and took on a new life as a teacher, husband, and soon-to-be father.

When I think of Gary now, I feel more gratitude than sadness. I am in awe, really. There are so many people in this world. In my neighborhood, when I cross paths with people on the street, my lizard brain sometimes feels threatened. I would say that, in general, people feel a lot of competitiveness, stand-offishness, and insecurity in relation to each other. The friendship that I had with Gary was pure. He was no longer in the rat race of life. He could not compete anymore. He wasn’t striving for anything. He wasn’t preoccupied with politics. He was a powerless man, waiting to die. As sad as that was, there was beauty in it. I am sorry for his pain. I wish that he never had to suffer as he did. But the transformation that it brought about was beautiful, and that is what I am in awe of. There is a well-known passage of the Bible that says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26) When Gary talked about his past, it sounded like he had a heart of stone. But as he sat, in pain, waiting to die, I saw that his heart was softening day by day. The man who I saluted as the bus doors closed was a very different man than the one I first met.

I hope that I never suffer the way Gary did. I hope that no one ever suffers like that. But still, when I remember Gary and his journey, I have to say that life is beautiful. Focusing on beauty makes it easier to say goodbye.

I’ve got it! I know how to make my Kindergarten students feel better about saying goodbye to the teacher candidate: I’ll tell them the story of how my friend Gary got sick with ALS, got confined to a chair in a nursing home, and eventually took medical assistance in dying. That will surely make them feel better!

No, I won’t do that. But I might explain to them that the word Goodbye comes from “God be with you” (or “God be with ye” if speaking to a group. And Adieu literally means, “to God”.) When people used to say goodbye, it was with the understanding that they were entrusting the other person to God. They wouldn’t worry about the other person because they would know that they were in God’s hands. So maybe I’ll explain to the kids what it means to say goodbye to the teacher candidate: we are trusting that God is looking after her on the rest of her journey.

In a few weeks, I will entrust my little flock of 4 to 6-year-olds to God, as we all continue on our respective journeys.