Listen to an audio version of this story below.
He was sitting on the floor, hanging onto my leg, deep fear palpable on his face reflecting the anxiety-ridden content of a note that I was now holding in one hand. My other hand was holding the beachouse phone, the only outside line at our location at this little backpack hostel owned by a friend of mine. I’d brought my students to Fiji, about 18 of them including another instructor who wanted to come along. My husband and oldest daughter among them. I’d been encouraged to design an international study tour to a place I’d lived and worked in, to bring these students from an urban community college in a rustbelt town to the tropical paradise in the middle of the South Pacific.
It was supposed to be a beautiful learning experience, but one also fraught with stress because I had other reasons for coming back. I still had a home here, friends, adopted family. And my immediate family ached to see them again after following the news of political unrest from the previous year. The evidence of that unrest was still apparent in the ruins and graffiti that covered an old lighthouse-turned-restaurant on the coast, outside the capital city.
Workshops had been arranged, visits to cultural sites scheduled, and a student interchange between my Flint students and the university journalism students in Fiji who’d been trying to do their work diligently throughout the turmoil of the previous year.
The group arrives at dawn. • Photo by author
Even an art exhibition was scheduled where my students would share their own conceptual self-portraits on the walls of the national museum, while also learning that week about the work of indigenous artists in the region.
But none of that mattered at the moment. It was only day 1 of the trip and Allan clung to my leg on the floor, fully engulfed in a nervous breakdown that would eventually break me down. The voice on the other end, his mother, sounded in my ear – “Life would be so much easier if I only had one son,” she said. Shocked by her words, I later would learn she was at that moment suffering the shattering of her own mental health.
My next moves were swift. I’d had the forethought to have students sign temporary healthcare POAs since the college I worked for was not yet prepared for overseas study tours at the time. And so I reached out to my old doctor on the island, explaining the situation. He quickly arranged for us to meet with the only psychiatrist in the country at his office near Suva, the capitol, over an hour and a half away. I called my friend, the owner of the beachouse, who’d been renting my home. And he quickly arranged for my dear student’s belongings to be moved to his own private room with a caregiver, a kind Fijian man who served as the gardener most days.
The rest of the trip moved ahead fairly well. His classmates rallied around Allan, including him when he seemed up to participating. And supporting him even after our return to the states. Two other students, Jimmy and Will, became very protective. Jimmy especially would check into the classroom on the days he knew Allan was supposed to be there to make sure he was doing okay.
But about six weeks after our return to Michigan, 9/11 occurred. My dear student had no support outside of school and so looked devastated when I had to tell him that the college was closing and he had to go home.
In the ensuing weeks, as we all struggled to regain some kind of equilibrium from this post-9/11 new world order, we missed the signs. One Friday, Jimmy came into my office to tell me he hadn’t seen Allan in class the day before. And just as Jimmy went back to work in the lab outside my office, my phone rang. It was Allan’s old girlfriend.
Her voice crumbled through the phone lines. “He’s shot himself,” I heard her say, just before I screamed myself – “SHIIIITTTTTT!!!!!” The rest of the details laid bare that he had fallen deeply into his psychosis in the weeks after 9/11 while struggling to complete his school work that included a post-travel piece of art.
His classmates came together again to mourn his loss, struggling to understand the depth of his pain. Later, I would be given his artwork, portfolios, and black books – sketchbooks where he’d plan out his graffiti art. It was among these pieces, I discovered where he was going with his final piece. And in a dream, I saw it completed and I made it so.
It took nearly a year to put together the final follow-up exhibition. Students struggled to redefine who they were post travel. But who were we after a trip to the other side of the world, meeting others who’d faced unrest in their own backyard? Some had come back thinking that maybe their own lives weren’t as bad by comparison, coming from the rough streets of this former bustling automotive factory town. But 9/11 turned everyone’s world upside down, seeing the attacks on our own country. And even the geographic distance from that horror shrunk further when weeks later, the students learned that their friend had given up on life and ended his.
One student came to me and said, “l’ll need to redo my post-trip self portrait. It’s too balanced, too static,” they said. Life had had too many twists and turns and they needed to reflect that balance as if on the edge of falling.
Looking back on this group of inveterate travelers from a quarter century ago, this old woman feels something not so much as grief, but awe. The healing gift of time has shown me that Allan’s nervous breakdown and death maybe weren’t bookends that defined a tragic legacy.
No. With a longer view, I can see it wasn’t a legacy with a tragic ending, after all. Instead, it was the launching of incredible maturing and growth by so many of his fellow students, now adults with established careers and grown children of their own. Longterm friendships were built, regardless of distance, connections that would endure through darkness and light. And most importantly, there was profound resilience.
Because life is a journey filled with triumphs and tragedies. And the only way to keep upright through it all at the edge of balance is to keep moving forward, knowing that – though we might not always see them – we are not traveling alone.
The above prose was expanded from a 13-minute writing exercise during a six-week workshop offered by @LauraLentzWriter and her Literati Academy. The writers participating in this series are exploring their way through grief and the hero’s journey.
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