Grief

In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced a model for how people deal with with grief, commonly known as the "Five Stages." Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance: not everyone experiences every stage, and they don't necessarily occur in that order, but it's generally accepted as a decent prototype for grieving. Usually the stages are a result of the death of a loved one or some other such incident, but today I found myself sprinting through them faster than Rush Limbaugh is taking down the credibility of the GOP. 

You see, today something not so good happened. In fact, in most circles, one might describe the event as very, very bad. One of my kindergarten students, Michelle, can't be more than 6 or 7 years old. She has attended Hanyang Oregon since I started here six months ago, but we just started a new semester and she moved up a level because of her excellent reading skills. Today I taught my new "story time" class with her, and she did a first-rate job of reading such sentences as "The jam is on the bread" and "The ham is on the bread." I had the students write out these sentences in their notebooks for practice. At the end of class, I exclaimed the usual, "Okay! Clean-up time! Everyone put your books and things away, please!" The children bustled around the room, putting notebooks into cubbies, tossing erasers into boxes. Michelle looked at me, concerned, and said, "Teacher! Not finished!" I told her it was okay, she could finish it later, and left without a second thought. 

A few hours later, I learned that somehow, minutes, maybe seconds later, Michelle tripped, was pushed, bumped into . . . something. By some means, she ended up with the pencil thrust into her skull four centimeters deep, just between her nose and her eye socket. 

My reaction?

1) Denial: I zone out. I am frozen. I feel . . . nothing. I stop listening to the story. Because that's all it is. What? That's absurd, I was with her just hours ago and she was fine. Someone must be exaggerating something. Those kindergarteners cry at the drop of a hat, she probably just poked herself in the forehead or something. 

2) Anger: IDIOT SMALL CHILDREN!!! Why do they always have to be running around and acting like brainless half-wits? STUPID! Well if she wasn't being careful, she probably deserved what was coming to her. ARGH!

3) Bargaining/Guilt (my own addition to the phases): Oh my god. This is completely my fault. If I hadn't been so eager to get back upstairs and actually watched her put her pencil away, this never would have happened. If she ends up okay, I will never, ever neglect my students like this again. 

4) Denial: What? This again? No, it's not a big deal. She's fine. It's not like the pencil actually went into her eye or something and BLINDED her. When you look at it from the right angle, this is actually a very lucky situation.

5) Anger: STUUUUUPIIIIDDD CHIIIILLDREEEEEN!!!!!!!

6) Depression: I shouldn't even bother being a teacher if I can't keep my kids from potentially fatal injuries. Why was I even hired? 

I haven't exactly reached the acceptance stage yet. I just keep pinballing between the first four at an alarming pace. I can't seem to stop thinking about the fact that the human skull is far less than 4 centimeters thick, and that the frontal lobe controls such things as motor function, memory, language, judgment, and social behavior. The fact that Michelle's version of the story doesn't match up with anyone else's--that she may have suffered brain damage. 

I know logically that this could have happened anywhere, at any time. It is a stroke of luck that the pencil didn't dash itself straight into her cornea. But I also can't stop thinking that if I had snatched that pencil right out of her hand, she might be home right now instead of in the ER.