Grief therapy, 1962

It is a comforting, yet unfortunate reality that when tragedy strikes a school, counselors swarm upon students offering an outlet for their grief. The death of a classmate or teacher from illness, accident or violent act often induces a range of emotions: some students collapse, while others stumble around in shock. Others dissolve into fits of laughter. All reactions, the professionals reassure us, are appropriate.

But this always wasn't so. When I tell friends about the death of a little girl in my kindergarten class, they are shocked by the response of parents, teachers and administrators. Her death still haunts me like a bad hangover, and I often wonder if 45 years later, her parents still carry the wound.

It was the fall of 1962 and I could not wait to escape the tangle of my mother's apron strings to venture into the Big World. I insisted upon no adult chaperone as I marched triumphantly to the corner bus stop. I soon learned that kindergarten -- and independence -- weren't all that they were cracked up to be. By the time the school bus wound its way through our budding suburban landscape of spanking new subdivisions, corn fields and American Gothic farmhouses, there were no seats left on the bus. We were crammed into the aisles and forced to ride standing up the mile or so to school. I distinctly remember my feet leaving the floor as the bus driver swerved around the traffic circle, trying to get us to school before the first bell.

I also went to the wrong classroom, and remember sitting there for an hour before it occurred to the teacher that I didn't belong. I recall experiencing that first familiar, sweeping feeling of dread that I had horribly fucked up as I was unsympathetically escorted to the correct classroom and seated at a table filled with strange children, who were somehow more competent than me. Both teachers seemed to look at me, as if thinking, "Boy, we have a real stupid one, don't we." My first foray into the Big World was shaping up to be a disaster, if not a life-long pattern.

Seated at my table was a little girl named Debbie. She immediately asserted her dominance over our table of cowering four- and five-year-olds. She was chubby little girl, bossy and complicated. One minute Debbie would act like your best friend in the whole world; the next minute, she'd be broadcasting to the rest of the class how there was snot on your coat.

For the next several weeks I found kindergarten to be terribly boring and complex, as I desperately tried to learn social skills and sit still while the teacher blabbed on at the front of the classroom. Worst of all, we had to lie on the cold tile floor and "nap" at the end of the morning session, before we were loaded back on the less chaotic kindergarten bus (there were plenty of seats for everyone) and ferried home to our respective cornfield subdivisions. I might as well have been at home.

My first year of school was also interspersed with periodic bouts of tonsillitis. I missed so many days, that there was even talk of holding me back a year, but because I was the tallest and biggest kid in my class, my mother vehemently lobbied for me to continue on to first grade, lest I be pegged as "retarded."

Meanwhile, Debbie provided no end of amusement. Full of destructive character flaws, she was the only interesting thing about kindergarten. While our class feared her mercurial moods, we also marveled at her incredible balls. She even made the boys look like women, back-talking the teacher and sneaking candy during class. One morning, Debbie brought her three-year-old sister to school because her mother had a hair appointment. We watched in fascination as Debbie's little sister made a boom-boom on the floor. The teacher spent the next several minutes in the principal's office, no doubt rousing Debbie's mother from under the hair dryer at the Clip 'n Curl beauty salon, informing her that she was not running a baby-sitting service.

Debbie seemed to have it in for me in particular, criticizing my dresses, questioning the authenticy of my Show 'n Tell treasures ("That's not a real Chatty Cathy!"), or making fun of my hand-me-down boys' raincoat that had once belonged to one of my older brothers. As mean and hurtful as Debbie was, one morning she really came through for me.

We were assigned to draw pictures of houses. By then, my teacher was already in the process of switching me from a lefty to a righty, grabbing the crayon out of my left hand and jamming it into my right. My houses came out looking like missile silos, with rounded roofs. The teacher kept giving me new sheets of paper, demanding that I draw a proper house with a triangular-shaped roof, until there was a mound of crumpled paper on the floor next to my chair. When the teacher wasn't looking, Debbie grabbed the sheet of paper and drew the house for me. I was happily coloring it in when the teacher came back to our table to check our work. "Didn't Rainy draw a beautiul roof," Debbie happily crowed. Sick of me, the teacher barely acknowledged my feat. I was just happy to get her off my back, innocently unaware that Debbie and I had both cheated.

One October morning Debbie wasn't in class. We were called to sit on the carpet in front of the piano. Our teacher told us that Debbie had been involved in a horrible accident and was in the hospital. When I got home from school, my mother said that Debbie had climbed up on the stove in the kitchen where there were pots boiling, to reach some candy stowed in the upper cabinets. Her stockings caught on fire, and then her dress. The fire consumed her body and she was lying in a oxygen tent in the children's wing at Lutheran General Hospital. An appeal in the local newspaper called for blood donors. We made Debbie get-well cards in class, and today I picture them propped like tents on her small, lifeless form.

Then we forgot all about her. The world grew angry, too angry to stop for a burnt up little girl. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in full swing. There were air-raid drills every day, where we practiced running into the halls like maniacs and curling up into little balls in front of our lockers. My father taught my brother how to shoot a .22 in the basement, instructing him to shoot even his best friend, Billy, if Billy came skulking around our basement looking to score from our five-year supply of Campbell's soup, in the event that the Ruskies dropped the big one.

But the Cuban Missile Crisis passed without the world being blown into oblivion. Our teacher read us stories about little Caroline Kennedy's pony, Macaroni. I had more bouts of tonsillitis, as my parents tried to stall my surgery until after the birth of my little brother. I stayed home from school with a head full of mucus, high on codeine cough syrup and nursing a sore butt from painful penicillin shots watching reruns of "I Love Lucy."

It was probably around December when I realized that Debbie still hadn't come back to school. Where the hell was she, I wondered. I became obsessed, until one morning in the girls' washroom during our morning potty break, I asked another girl when Debbie was coming back. "She died," the girl told me. Died? I knew that "died" meant that you became invisible and were never coming back. I didn't believe her. When we got back to the classroom, I angrily marched up to the teacher and announced loudly in front of the entire class, "DID DEBBIE DIE?"

"Yes," the teacher shot back at me. "And we're never going to talk about it again."

I remember feeling bretrayed that this information had been withheld from me. I asked my mother if Debbie had really died when I got home from school. "Yes," she said, somewhat more compassionately than my teacher, but that was the end of any further conversation about her, through the proceeding years of elementary school and all the way through high school.

I still wonder if I missed some announcement of Debbie's death during one of my many absences from school, but I doubt it. I think our parents, teachers and principal all just hoped we would forget about her, that she had even been in our class, as if erasing her short life from existence. They probably thought they were sparing us, but they were wrong.

In the ensuing years there were other deaths of classmates and teachers that were handled just as badly. During my sophomore year of high school, a boy tumbled to his death from atop the town's water tower. There were no announcements in class, just a wild rumor circulating the student body that the kid leapt to his death while high on LSD Dianne Linkletter-style, thinking he could fly. That same year, our principal died after a short illness. My friends and I responded cynically, laughing through the school-wide memorial and thrilled with the gift of an unplanned day off from school.

In the summer of 1973, three students in the senior class died. One boy from an undetected heart birth defect; the second boy from drowning while swimming in a quarry; and the third, a girl in my art class, died of the same cancer that had plagued Ted Kennedy's son. She, too, just disappeared from class one day. For some reason, my journalism teacher assigned me the task of writing their obituaries for the school newspaper. I remember feeling terribly embarrassed sending copies of the paper to their parents, which I stuffed into envelopes with no accompanying note of explanation or condelence.

But none of these deaths hit me as profoundly as Debbie's. Maybe because she was the first. I'm glad she helped me cheat in kindergarten, because it gave me a reason to like her, instead of being burdened with the added guilt that I had somehow been responsible for her death all those other times I hated her for being a selfish brat. I'm sure that most of us have a "Debbie" in our childhood pasts. If you're like me, you're probably still looking for closure.