The update was posted on the school website. Two sentances with three mispelled words above the old info and dead links for enrollment. None of us parents noticed it. It wasn't until a news story about the sudden closure mentioned it that I looked. The news cast interviewed the principal, she said that she wasn't able to read minds, but she definitly believed her teachers because they knew some personal information about her. She didn't specify what. She asked for empathy and support for her staff. That there is enough to take in from a class of 30 without having to hear all of their thoughts. That the kids struggle and that their thoughts reflect that and are often more than she has the recources to deal with. That won't change though. The teachers won't get help just like they didn't get help before. Not unless they are poached by some rich suburban school full of brilliant white pupils who need kind adults to understand them perfectly. As if my boys don't need that.

My wife was able to get the last two days off. I'll be off tommorow. The day after will be trouble unless Myra convinces her mom to take them. They don't mind not going to school, the place was quite commonly a hell hole for them.

There's been some news of what the teachers are up to. One was evacuated from under her desk where she had hid. Her wrists were cut, but the news thinks she'll survive. Another is in custody after she shot one of her students step-fathers. I can't say I blame her. I don't want to know what that man had done.

I wonder what it would be like if it was a different school that had this happen some, happy go lucky private school in the middle of nowhere. There would be some note in a newspaper about an amazing academy that turned out the bright future of america. They would be gifted teachers shaping the future, and being the change they wished to see in the world. They would make songs about the value of friendship and publish them to youtube. My boys would complain that they had to sing those songs, and that the school lunch was terrible, and that Jayden shoved them into a snowbank and their pencils broke. They would ask us to make them lunches to bring from home. And we thinking of the thin pickings in the fridge would tell them that that is just the way the world is and that they have deal with it. Words that those gifted teachers would never say.

I wish I had it in me to hope for change, improvement, a brighter future for my boys. I can't right now though, I'm tired. Maybe in the morning I'll catch a few seconds of hope before the tired ache sets in again.

I had my godmother write those words on a tie of a little bear that my roomate had been trying to get rid of. I gave it to him on the last friday of the school year. He was leaving with his older sister and brother. I said that since it was the last day of after school I wanted to give him this because working with him had been a gift and a joy. He hugged me. His sister asked why she didn't get one. I told her it was because I only had one and that I was a terrible person, one lie and one truth. They left and I headed back into the school, my day was far from done. I didn't see him much during the last four days. I went to his graduation. Smiled too much. He had made it through his first year at a school that would continue to beat the shit out of him.

A school that had an afterschool program that wasn't enough fun and had too many rules. Rules that I enforced too much.

A school that would throw his poverty in his face with their spirit shop. Because something was needed to touch the gap between the funding they were given and the funding that they and their community needed. I counted the coins he brought one week with him. I was surprised by how well he could count by 5's and 10's. I followed him when he took one of the branded water bottles we were selling for 3 dollars each. I stood at the entrance to his classroom and waited. I lied to the teacher when she asked why I was there. He brought the water bottle back after a bit. I smiled and said that he wasn't in trouble and that I hoped he had a good day. Hoping against hope that I wasn't building up shame in him about what happened.

A school whose principal yelled at him when he took extra cereal for breakfast.

He's back there for another year now I think. I can't be there for him this year not that me being there last year meant anything. But he has the bear, or had it. No doubt he's pulled off the tie, discarded it, or chewed on it. Dropped the bear in a puddle or forgotten it somewhere.

Maybe though, he's held it close in a dificult moment and its brought some manner of comfort that I might have provided last year. Maybe he read those words and remembered that he is loved even though he lives in a world that treats him as a burden and a pain.

I am 19 years old.

There is a child. He likes me for some reason, has joy in his voice when he says my name, leaving out the Mr. he’s supposed to put in front of it. I’ll never tell him that though. There’s something in him though, a desperate crawling empty need. Something he clutches at me to ease or fill, but I can’t not in the one year I get to be there for him. I can cover it for a second, let him sit in my lap, hold my hand, use my coat as a hat. But it’s there, always. Sometimes it comes out in full force, he stands still staring at something, the radiator in the hallway is a common choice, or he’ll walk out of the school, kicking a snow bank and looking at the wall. I’ll crouch next to him, try to tell him that he has to go inside, go to class, learn, grow, get ready for me to abandon him. But it isn’t enough I can’t join him in that empty need that he sits in, all I can do is be with him, be there for him, ready to lift him out, let him know that I’ll always be there for him. But I won’t be. I’ll be gone in a year, and I can’t explain to him the reasons why, not in a way he’ll understand. He’ll just know that I’m gone and that there is a new batch of tall people in red jackets that think they can save him, that think he’s adorable and cute. That’ll laugh when he takes there stuff, when he thinks they will do anything he asks, because for one year they will. We will dig our way into his life, drag up the joy make him love and need us and then leave him. And then when the years of losses have beaten him down and he’s old enough to no longer be cute when he fails to respect us, we’ll try to dig past the walls to the child inside and maybe we'll succeed, and give him another year of love, before another batch leaves him.

But here I am for this year, and I’ll keep going, held together by some vain hope and little moments that keep the broken pieces from crumbling. Seeing him show his stuffed animal to another student, both of them smiling, him running by not noticing me in his joyful game, or seeing him watch his father picking away at a guitar as he puts on his backpack to go home. And sometimes that is enough for me to keep going until I can escape, let go of his pain in the way he can't, and be put back together by time in the way that he'll be beaten down.

It’s near the end of one of the two roads that make up a tiny little town in western maine. A little grave yard with maybe fifty gravestones in it. Ten or so have my last name on them. I only know the person under one of those gravestones, my grandmother who I barely remember, just the idea of a smile, and a thought of her arthritic hands. My dad would always stop on the way home to look at that stone, a way to ease out the dust of grief. My grandfather would visit sometimes too, take four of his sons and walk among the stones, tell a story of the many grave stones he knew. The uncle of his shot in world war two, who had survived because of a bible or a tin of tabaco infront of his heart and then died of old age.

But next to my grandmother there is a space missing a stone, where two slabs of dirt have been placed back on the ground, and rain has hidden the lines. Under that there is a container that holds a box of my father’s ashes, a folded paper of instructions, and a bottle of glue. We haven’t found a headstone yet, eventually we will, a natural stone from the river that the road follows. Dad would like that we hope. And on it my parents names will be put, and then when my mother dies we will pull back those two chunks of dirt and pull out the paper and the glue. And then as we were told on the day we buried our father, us children will bury our parents, gluing the container closed and shoving it back in the ground. The uncles that buried it the first time will probably be dead by then, so we’ll shovel the dirt ourselves. The glue and the directions we’ll throw away, eager to be rid of them. Then when we walk the graveyard we’ll see three people we knew, one nearly forgoten, two filled with aching memories, and many more, the stories of which we’ll have forgotten. And we’ll stop when we’re leaving, maybe trailing our own kids behind, but probably we’ll be alone, alone and letting their stories drift away in the dust of grief that we let looses from our hearts, born by the soft wind filled with black flies that we used to walk through without caring.

It was last november, we were in the car, waiting at a red light. I was driving, I had just gotten my license and was trying to get used to the old clunky van I would be driving for the next year. We were coming home from a shopping trip, about to turn left onto the highway where the trip would blur to its close. Bruce springsteen was talking about his father. The live 1975-85 disc 3 was in the somehow still functional CD player, on The River, the first five minutes of which was him telling a story of growing up, his long hair, the Vietnam war, and his dad. Above all else though it was about the reafirmation of his father’s love in spite of disagreements, fights and resentments, something that as I listened I realized I had never needed. I had always known that my father loved me, known even when he was grumpy while doing the dishes, or pushing for conversation with a quiet teenager as if that would ever work. He had never thought that the army might fix me or teach me some respect, never hated my long hair, never even questioned it.

And as we sat in the old smell of that van, watching the red turn arrow in front of us and listening to those words, I knew that I should say something, something to affirm what a wonderful dad my father was, how he was better than Bruce Springsteen’s dad, and to just let him know that I knew and that I was grateful.

I didn’t say anything though. I am far quicker with a written word 11 months later than I am with a spoken one in a fleeting meaningful moment. Even now I don’t know what I would say, the exact words elude me, I worry where I should place the commas, still not understanding that human emotions aren’t captured in the perfection of words but their honesty. I wish I had said something in that moment, forced some words out my mouth, jarbled and meaningless, but filled with love and gratitude, or in any of the moments of the next four months before my dad was gone. Gone on a night when that same CD sat in the CD player, at the end of Jersey Girl, ready to loop around again to The River. I didn’t let it loop and haven’t dared listen to that story again.

So I’m sorry dad, sorry I forgot to tell you while I could. But now a few random strangers on the internet know that I loved you and am forever grateful for the 18 years I got of your parenting.

As if that helps.