Spring Thaw

...recovering from emotional callousness

Photo Cliff Scholz

As I lay breathing a couple Sundays ago, for some reason the faces of various high school classmates who either died young or suffered big losses started to appear in my inner vision. One recollection led to another.

As I mentioned recently in “A Whole Life: Why Memory Matters,” such deep-past recollections while doing breathwork are not typical for me. Mostly I’m just feeling my body, mapping out sensations and points of resistance. I’m certainly not implying that entertaining maudlin or sentimental reflections on the past is a wonderful or useful outcome. When I’m breathing, I am simply obedient to the breath and process.

So as I lay there, I recalled moments of seeing these classmates at various times in school. I recalled the ways I felt about each of them and the impressions they left on me. Even specific things they said to me over the years came back, and the quality of their voices. This was a long time ago. I graduated in 1980 in a class of about a hundred. Ours was a mostly rural though fairly prosperous school district, but for some reason my class had more than its share of tragedy.

For example, one of my classmates, as the story was told to me, was hanging out with his best friend, also a classmate, playing records and joking around. He pointed a .22 caliber rifle at his friend, pulled the trigger and shot him dead through the heart at close range. He thought the rifle wasn’t loaded, I was told. Another event involved a newly licensed driver, and the story I recall was he was passing a joint to a friend in the passenger seat with the same hand he was using to steer with or something, inadvertently driving the car into a tree. Not sure if my classmate was the driver or passenger, but he died of head injuries in that accident. Another I heard about drove a truck out onto lake ice — common enough here in Michigan in those days — but the ice didn’t hold, the truck went through and he was the only survivor in the vehicle. Another, the son of a prominent local family, died fairly soon after graduation on the highway coming home from college. Alcohol-related, I was told. Still another classmate of mine watched a sister a couple years younger than him slowly die of cancer. It broke him. I watched him change from a quiet but pretty normal kid to, well… he went out of his mind. Last time I saw him was nine years after we graduated. I encountered him on the street in a different town where I was living by then. We chatted briefly. He still didn’t make any sense.

Now granted, I’m relying on my memory here but that’s the best I can do for now. I am pretty sure I got the main things right.

And what came to me as these faces returned is that all these events were huge. Thing is, my own rural neighborhood was the kind of place where, if you heard an ambulance siren on one day you’d probably find out what happened the next day. People talked. This became a bit of an issue for me when I first went to college with a major regional hospital a mile or two away. Sirens were going by the dorms day and night. I’d awaken, startled. It took time for me to get used to the idea of anonymous tragedy. Maybe because there is no such thing as an anonymous tragedy. There are people in the back of those ambulances, it’s just that I don’t usually happen to know their names. I eventually learned to block it out. I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing.

About these other losses, it’s only now that I’m realizing the emotional shockwaves these events must have sent through our community. When we’re growing up, what happens is all we know, so even with big events like these, we adjust, we adapt, we move on.

But looking back now, I see how the deaths of young people, especially, leave holes in a community. Profound impact. It’s as though their unlived lives and all those unlived years create a bigger empty space than when an older person dies, someone who had time enough to fill their years with living. And as I breathed and felt the poignancy around all this, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why now? Why am I thinking about these people today? It’s been 45 years! And to be honest, I didn’t feel close to any of them at the time. In fact I recall being pretty callous about it, going instantly into judgment, thinking or saying things like: “That was stupid” or “”What an idiot.”

The only occasion when I recall getting emotionally real about such things during that era was one time in Biology class. I was one of a group of four lab partners: there was my next door neighbor and a good friend, another was a rising star on the football team, the fourth the son of a local veterinarian. We were seated facing one another across two black-topped lab tables pushed together to form a square, the tables right next to an anatomical manikin on the countertop by the wall. The manikin’s face displayed a cut-away view showing the interior of the mouth, nasal passages, trachea, salivary glands, epiglottis, sinuses. The kid sitting next to me looked over at it, pointed, and spoke the last name of the classmate who had recently died with his head smashed in.

We laughed. We laughed and laughed and suppressed our laughter, all four of us boys soon with our heads down on our lab tables, our faces in the hollows of our arms. But when we finally looked up and wiped our eyes, nobody was smiling.

And what came to me today is that we tend to constrict around our losses and the big feelings that come with them. We freeze up like winter, but we keep moving on, as it seems we must. I’m not saying I was wrong to emotionally distance myself from such events when I was young. We have our own lives to live. But there are under-appreciated risks in the habit of emotional distancing and callousness, of moving instantly into judgment or compartmentalization rather than feeling. Over time we can set the conditions for a creeping emotional freeze-up, not noticing that such callousness can eventually result in a loss of consciousness. It’s easy to normalize that. It’s easy to get stuck, perhaps without even noticing, in a kind of permanent emotional winter. I think that’s what I’m starting to notice I’ve been in, and what I’m starting to notice I’m coming out of.

That said, there’s no telling how long such a winter might last or what it will take to bring the light and warmth of our feelings back. And there’s probably also no hurrying it along to make things different. Seems we thaw when we do. Today as I revisited these people in memory I realized that I was carrying a piece of those losses: still, after all those years! Things land deeper in childhood, and I guess I had deeper relationships there than I thought, just by having thrown softballs back and forth or traded insults. Just by having been amused or hurt by them, or even just by ignoring them or being ignored. With the lad in the car that hit the tree, our lockers were side-by-side one year because our names were alphabetical in sequence. That’s enough closeness, sometimes. Looking back, although I’d never have thought such a thing back then, that kid had a definite boyish charm to him. I could see why he was popular. All of this registers. Maybe it’s time I pay my respects.

Then again, now that I think of it, when I’m driving the narrow gravel road near our home and approach a crest a hill, I often think of yet another event, a classmate’s older brother who died in a head-on collision on a hilltop on a similar, narrow gravel road on his way to an employee function at Bill Knapps. Since then every such hilltop became a mental monument to him. I don’t think he got a chance to graduate from high school, or maybe he had just graduated, but I recall he’d been accepted to a favored university. My mom and his mom were friends. Such grief is always collective. Maybe I’m just noticing that reality.

So, with all of this, I thawed a little. And as a result, I think I now also better understand a much more recent incident.

I currently live in a different small town located in the same chain of lakes and hills where I grew up. One day I think about three years ago, I saw a group of high school cheerleaders posed for a photo on the cover of our local newspaper and I was surprised when quick tears came to my eyes. The town where I live had made national headlines some months earlier when four of our local high schoolers were gunned down by another student one day. Those girls had been there. They lived through that. And in the photo, they smiled.

I had heard the police helicopters flying overhead the day it happened. Later I read the news reports, stone-faced. Hardened.

But looking at those fresh young smiles in the photo, I finally started to get a glimmer of the enormity of what really happened that day — the shock and loss and horror of it, yes, and the strength and humanity that welled up in the aftermath. A bit of light streamed in. I melted some. I started to flow, and all I can say is, it seems to be absolutely essential to do so, whenever I can.

It’s never too late for spring.