Almost 20 years ago now, a teacher who meant a lot to me died by suicide. I thought of that, and of him, today because somehow it took 19 recurrences of this date for me to remember that I was once told he was one of the reverberating losses of the event we mark on 9/11. He had a history of depression, but the episode he was in when that disease killed him was triggered, or maybe fed, by the loss of friends in the collapsed Twin Towers. I was told at some point, by someone—likely a teacher struggling to give me clarity on a loss we can never really understand—that John Wake had struggled terribly with the fact that our private school wouldn’t give him time off to go look for his friends, or at least their bodies.
I’ve grown to hate the annual collective marking of 9/11, the stories we tell over and over. When I covered the actual memorial for the first time, I was powerless against the emotion of being in the presence of people who had suffered real losses: sons, wives, brothers, aunts, fathers. In particular, I still remember a family who told me that their son’s remains were never found, only his Blockbuster card. It was 12 years later and reporters younger than me probably wouldn’t have known what a Blockbuster card looked like, how flimsy those things were. What cut was imagining the hope they were probably unable to let go of, for how long? What if he was just… somewhere? Maybe he forgot who he was? Maybe he made a decision to be someone else? His sister wore his clothes for months after, his parents told me. Her body swimming in her brother’s sweatshirts.
But the collective, media-fed remembering annoys me, worse every year. So much bad came from our immediate mythologizing of that event. And I wonder how much it does for the people who actually lost, to be joined only once a year in their grief, in this way that actually feels like an extension of a nationalist brainwashing, a reinforced victim complex to justify decisions that led to so many more deaths. Bad choices by bad actors, with long consequences.
Today, though, I wonder what Mr. Wake would think. Would he go to these memorials, engage in them? Would he find them helpful. And then I wonder if we would’ve stayed friends, or become friends, if at some point I would’ve switched to calling him John. Would I have gone to bars to see him sing blues with his band? Would I have become friends with his wife? Would I have ever known when he struggled, if he’d had the chance to get back up and inevitably struggle again? Would he have been able to help me when I did, and would that have ever maybe helped him, just a little bit, even?
I think about typing “John Wake was” and realize I can’t finish that sentence because I didn’t really know him. How can a 15-year-old who sees an adult for an hour once a week in an after school program know that adult? I can tell you who he was to a 15-year-old in his care, to the elementary school children he taught science. I can tell you what he seemed like when you’d pass him in the stairs or the hallway, what he looked like, and what I learned of him when a teacher let me write his obituary, in a kindly attempt to give me some sort of closure. I was handed a redacted CV that amounted to a handful of lines; I asked, “But what did he do in the other time that isn’t here?” I wanted to know him. I still want to have known him.
John Wake was a very good singer. I learned that posthumously, when the high school librarian loaned me a CD of John’s band and told me I could make a copy but to please give it back. I made a copy onto a CD and then two onto cassette tapes. I listened to them over and over, especially a cover of John Hiatt’s “Have a Little Faith In Me.” Still, when I hear that song come on the radio or in a supermarket or something, I have a moment of confusion when it’s Hiatt’s voice and not Wake’s. He was that good.
Or at least, he was to me. Once a few years ago, I found one of the old cassettes and played it in a car for my boyfriend at the time. He didn’t react and then asked if I could turn it off. He didn’t really like it. I was very in love with him at the time and the cruelty of that still cut through. I remember thinking blindly into nothingness, I’m sorry, Mr. Wake. I’m sorry, John. I shouldn’t have played it for him. I don’t even know if I should be here, in this car, with this person. I don’t know what I’m doing, at all, ever. I wondered then, if he was still alive, and we were friends, and I talked to him about this relationship, and how during it I had become so terrifyingly suicidal I could barely think anymore, what he would tell me.
I wonder if he was a good friend, if he would’ve been a good friend. I wonder if I’m as old now as he was then. Somewhere, in a box in a storage unit, I have a program from his memorial, I think. It might say how old he’d been then. I know somewhere in a box in a storage unit I have two other things: the speech the teachers let me give at their private memorial for him, which has visible tear stains in the ink that annoyed me the last time I saw it, and a card his wife wrote me, saying that I could reach out to her. I have thought about reaching out to her, but now that I am an adult, maybe the age she was then, I wonder how much I would want to hear questions, 20 years later, about the husband I found dead by suicide, from a girl I had to watch cry through a speech about how great he was. What if he wasn’t great to her? What if she was so mad at him? What if she has moved on and wants to move on? Or wants to move on?
I don’t know what it would accomplish to know about him, except maybe some minor fractional satisfaction of too-vast curiosity. The loss of this person changed me irrevocably. It stayed with me in a very present, almost tangible way, for so many years. I still think about him. I still think I can picture his face and his smile and hear the brogue of his voice, and I remember coming to after school photography one day nauseated and peaked after having smoked my first cigarette and Mr. Wake looking at me warmly like he knew and saying something comforting. Maybe he did know. He was the kind of teacher you could tell stuff like that to. He didn’t worry, at least not with us older kids, about performing adulthood in a way that shut us down or pushed us away from him. He told us the truth, or I guess what I believed was the truth, about how he started drinking as a teenager, but it was only to go to bars to listen to live music and he would do all his homework first before sneaking out (I realize now as I type that out that it does not really sound like a truth, though maybe it was the best version of the truth to tell teens whose main interest was stretching boundaries and brushing up against anything resembling a sort of palatable semi-danger). Anyway in my hazy memory I think I did tell him, because I think I remember him saying kindly something about how I should try not to get into that stuff, because it’s hard to quit and it makes you feel bad. Even when it stops making you feel bad right away, it still makes you feel bad, you just don’t really realize it.
If he did say that, he was right. I wouldn’t realize it for almost 20 years, but I also only really became a smoker after he died. Maybe I would’ve anyway; because of suicide, we’ll never get to know. Suicide took him over winter break, a winter break when my dad insisted on driving to my mom’s parents in Florida because of the shoe bomber (who, we all pointed out many times, was more of an attempted shoe bomber, a fact that didn’t matter to my father, who grew up in a war of terror and whose reaction to the country America became after 9/11/01 took me years to really understand, though who really knows if I do understand it, or can). I was 15, in 10th grade, and sad a lot of the time. The hour I spent once a week in that after school photography class with John Wake was one of the only times I ever felt okay, like I belonged on the planet, let alone in school, being a 15-year-old girl. In the car in some mid-Atlantic state, I looked out the window and resolved to spend more time with John Wake that coming semester. Maybe I could go down to the elementary school in my free periods and help with his science class, or hang out if he wasn’t busy. I had a moment of believing I could find ways to make my life more bearable, hurt less, and then I found out he was dead in an AOL chat room with my school friends the night before our first day back.
I remember every minute of that night more than I remember any minute with Mr. Wake, and I hate that. Alias was on the TV, my mom was on one couch, I was on the other with my dad and my laptop. The chat was confusing at first: someone asked if everyone had heard the elementary science teacher died and I thought they meant ours, from when we were little. Then someone typed something, “oh shit, Danielle is in here, we weren’t supposed to tell her.” At some point I screamed, which is embarrassing, because I hate in movies when women scream, but I was trying to get the words out to tell my parents what happened and it was like they all jammed in my throat. I called my homeroom teacher, a kind person who really tried hard to treat us all like interesting, full human people, instead of half-grown nuisances, and had given us his home phone number for emergencies. He was quiet and told me the truth. My parents still didn’t know what had happened and were frustrated with me and I blindly held the phone out and I think my mom took it. I couldn’t breathe and said I had to go outside, for air, and my dad gently pleaded with me to let him come with me. It was pouring rain and he tucked me under his shoulder, and we trudged to the end of the block and back while I sobbed. I got into bed soaking wet and called an older friend, then a freshman in college but the year before one of the theater kid seniors who took me in as their freshman pal, and cried to him. To his eighteen-year-old credit, he handled that phone call better than any adult in my high school handled any minute of the next several months. The next day in school when I stood at my locker, crying before class, the school guidance counselor walked past me. He stopped at the end of the hall and turned around and asked me if I was okay. I stared at him and said I wasn’t. “My favorite teacher killed himself.” The guidance counselor looked at me and said, “I hope you feel better,” and walked away.
I have felt venom toward that guidance counselor for a long time. I try now to imagine that maybe he was friends with Mr. Wake. Maybe he was in pain. Maybe he was scared he would cry in front of a kid and didn’t know if I was the kind of kid who would tell all the other kids and then what if he couldn’t guidance counselor a bunch of kids who just stood around laughing at him for crying one time? We weren’t great; we were teenagers. But I think back and I can’t imagine seeing any adult who cried about John Wake as anything other than someone I could maybe understand, who could maybe understand me. It might’ve been uncomfortable, being around a grownup who was crying. But it was worse being around grownups who walked away, and left me as alone as I felt.
I think maybe that is part of why when I came up to this small town and met people for the first time at an outdoor Passover seder, I couldn’t stop thinking about the 13-year-old girl at the seder who, when asked to reflect on the past year, slowly said, “I think the past year, I haven’t done a lot, but I’ve thought a lot about who I am and who I want to be.” And I watched her be visibly annoyed by any micro-movement her dad made, the way you are when you are a teenager and everything is unbearable, and I felt something like a calling, as cheesy as that feels to type, let alone imagine saying out loud. And why I went to the town library and I told them I’d like to volunteer, and do programming for teens, and why I went over to the home of a local mom and met with her and her daughter and did my best to explain that I don’t have kids but a lot of things happened to me when I was a teenage girl and it would mean a lot to me to be a Trusted Adult for teens in a community, in this community. I’d like to try to do that. I’d like to be someone who doesn’t walk away, who remembers what it is like to feel apocalyptically alone, and who is willing to try to help make sense of that, or find a way for things to be bearable despite that. Even if it’s just for an hour a week.
Anyway, this isn’t a 9/11 story, or even my 9/11 story. 9/11 didn’t kill John Wake, but it didn’t help. Capitalism helped even less, at least according to the story I was told. A culture of work that justifies demanding someone in pain still show up, that makes no concessions for humanity, that doesn’t see or celebrate humanity. I would’ve been sad if he took time off, we all would’ve missed him. And maybe it wouldn’t have helped. Maybe he was an addict like me, maybe he was searching for more pain to at least help explain all the pain he was always in. Maybe going down there would’ve been worse, not better. Maybe there was no helping him; maybe it was the end of the line for him and I’m just lucky it hasn’t turned out to be the end of the line for me so far. In truth, I feel a little silly for how badly I would like, today, for one more conversation with him, one last one, as two adults who could maybe really know each other.
Thank you. This is the only thing I want to read today. Just beautiful and profound.
Beautiful, Danielle! This resonates so much and makes me want to be there for 15 year old you and 15 year old me in the way no one else was. I’m glad that you are trying to be there for others, it’s a good way to honor the memory of John Wake.
Mary