The World Turned Upside Down
My friend’s recent death has got me struggling to get my feet back on the ground.
Last weekend, my mom’s phone chimed with a push notification. We were sitting in her living room, talking, and she glanced down at her phone to read it.
“Oh no,” she said. “There was an accident. A woman died — she was only your age.” She looked up at me. “What a horrible thing to happen on Mother’s Day weekend.”
I felt so sad to hear that news. And a little chilled that the woman was 43, just like me. Moments like those so often make you realize that it could have been you. Is it just sheer luck that I’m still here right now?
On Monday, I was scrolling through Facebook, which I almost never do anymore (I’ve found that being on Facebook just increases my stress and frustration with the state of the world). I noticed that dozens of friends had left messages on another friend’s wall. What? Was she sick? What was happening?
I clicked on the friend’s page — let’s call her Stephanie — and was stunned to see that the messages were memorials.
I scrolled through them in complete shock. Surely, I was misunderstanding. Maybe she was sick. And it was bad. And people were freaking out.
But I couldn’t deny the words that kept leaping out at me: gone, heartbroken, tragedy.
Near the middle of these messages was a link back to our local news station’s coverage on the accident that had happened over the weekend. I clicked on the article and there it was: the previously unidentified victim of the accident my mom had told me about just days before was my friend, Stephanie.
I met Stephanie almost ten years ago, when I was working as a literacy teacher. It was my first regular job after years of subbing, and I was so relieved to have a place to belong, to have colleagues that I could call friends.
Steph was one of my favorites. She was short, spunky, and sassy — she somehow knew how to take up a lot of space while simultaneously giving other people a lot of space, too.
Hers was my favorite classroom to visit. I’d sit there sometimes, after school, waiting for the rush to dissipate. Her daughter, a Kindergartner at the time, would come into the room and sit with me, giving me some of the stickers she had earned that day (which I’d later give to Steph to surreptitiously return to her daughter’s collection at a later time).
Steph and I weren’t super close, but I admired her immensely. Despite being born in the same year, she always seemed so much older and wiser to me. I looked up to her and she always made time for me, giving me advice and encouraging me.
Of course all of this is a very self-centered remembrance of a remarkable woman. If I were to pan out, even just a little bit, you would see someone who spent all of her adult life taking care of children — not just taking care of them, but healing them. As you can imagine, I’ve known a lot of teachers in my life, and yes, the majority of them are absolute superheroes, no question, but Steph… Steph was even more than that.
Steph was a Bodhisattva. Steph had the kind of selfless heart that would make Jesus weep with joy.
I looked up to her and she always made time for me, giving me advice and encouraging me.
How can I put into words the way she changed kids’ lives? The way she dodged the bullshit politics of public education so she could do what she knew what was right for her students? The way she gracefully navigated parental drama and so compassionately kept refocusing everyone’s attention on what really mattered: the kids.
One of our mutual friends posted on Facebook that it wasn’t fair that we lost a pillar of our community in such a freak accident. That it wasn’t fair for someone who was so young. That it wasn’t fair that her daughter witnessed her death and will forever feel the sting of pain and trauma every year on Mother’s Day because of this.
None of it is fair.
One of my favorite songs in Hamilton is Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down). I think of that song a lot right now because that’s exactly how I feel.
The world feels completely upside down these days.
Please tell me why, tell me how, after we have worked so hard, we are still arguing for women’s equality. Please tell me why, tell me how white men can shoot an unarmed black man jogging in his own goddamn neighborhood without consequence until a video is leaked, forcing public officials to take action months later.
The world feels completely upside down these days.
We have someone leading the country who has normalized racism and sexism, methodically destroying every social more that we have built to defeat those toxic ideologies. We’re in the midst of a pandemic and instead of taking care of one another, too many Americans want to fight for their right to be infected — and infect others — with this virus.
And my friend is dead. The world is without her strength, compassion, and utterly selfless heart.
How can this be?
The world is completely upside down.
In tarot, The Hanged Man is a card that, despite its creepy-sounding name, sometimes is read as a need to change one’s perspective — turn yourself upside down.
The whole world feels like The Hanged Man card right now. We don’t need to hang upside down — our world is upside down, already.
What scares me is that I don’t know what this new perspective is trying to tell me. There are things in my life that will be forever altered by this pandemic. And I don’t know what to make of that. I don’t even know how to face that, let alone choose a path from here.
The whole world feels like The Hanged Man card right now. We don’t need to hang upside down — our world is upside down, already.
How do I make the most of whatever time I have left? Steph’s passing only reminds me yet again how short life is.
How can I help the world find its way back to right-side-up? How can I help put the ground beneath our feet again?
Or are we meant to be hanging? Suspended like this, indefinitely?
“We know what works,” Steph once said to me. “We know how to be good teachers. Good people. But the systems of our world don’t make room for that. The systems are about profit, and ease, and efficiency. So we do what we can in the system. And sometimes, we just have to leave the system. Sometimes we have to do that just to save ourselves.”
In a way, I suppose we’ve always been suspended. Pandemic or not. Racist president or not. And maybe our world has always been upside down — but it just feels more severe in the face of a pandemic that has, blessedly (though not permanently) disrupted our dysfunctional systems. The systems that Steph tried so hard to change.
But right now, I find little comfort in that.
© Yael Wolfe 2020
