Layers of Truth about Why I Didn't Stand Up

            I interrupt this reflection on the obituary to talk about a more recent illustration of the same theme—layers of truth.  Everything we wrote in the obituary was true.  But there are layers of truth, so truth-telling doesn’t assure that everything essential has been said.    In the case of my mother, there’s nothing I want to say that could distract from the admirable person in this resume called an obituary.  What pained me then and still does now is that we were leaving out some details that made us seem dismissive of others—my father, my grandparents, my brother. 

            But something happened last night that illustrates something else about the layers of truth, so I’m going to leave the reflections on the obituary for a day and write about my own death last night.

            I didn’t stand up when I was asked to do my part in the honoring of a retiring colleague I adore.  I just sat there in the corner of the sofa, where I’d been sitting, and spoke almost exclusively to her as she sat just a few feet away.

            As a teacher, I almost never sit down.  It just isn’t possible to manage a classroom (monitor group work, check the progress of a written exercise, etc) or to present a lesson without standing up.

            Besides that, other teachers had already spoken, and all of them had stood.  One teacher, praising the student assistants in the ESL support lab, had joked about having note cards because he asks his students to use them in his public speaking class,  and I identified with that.  I too had tried to put to use what I was teaching so I wouldn’t appear to be the slowest, most inattentive learner when I taught that class.

            Just two days earlier, when a student had come to my office to practice her presentation, I had asked her to stand because “we get a different feeling when we’re standing, and we always stand when we give a presentation.”  

            Still, I stayed seated.

            I could now say that I remembered The King and I, which showed that no one’s head should be above that of the king, and our retiring colleague was royalty.  Maybe there really was some truth in this.  Maybe I wanted all the attention to be on her, not on me.

            But that’s only a layer of the truth.

            Here’s another layer.  I woke up yesterday morning feeling very sad and somehow doomed.  This was in great contrast to how I had felt the day before when my mood had been exuberant and I’d felt confident and sure as I went through the day, which proved to be one in which nothing could go wrong and nothing did.  I had no reason to feel sad yesterday.  I had been looking forward not to my friend’s retirement but to the gathering honoring her.  I’d felt good about the tributes I was putting in an album for her, and I thought the new words to a song I’d written—also using a verse another teacher suggested—was fun.  The day didn’t go badly, but I felt small and doomed and as if nothing I could do would be good enough, and even though I hate to use the cliché about the self-fulfilling prophesy (which is really the self-fulfilled personal prophesy), I think I felt so diminished that I could only diminish myself further, making myself smaller, almost disappearing.

            I left what had really been a wonderful gathering feeling small, and it was only this morning, the morning after, that it dawned on me that I hadn’t stood up.  I could have made a real presentation.  I could have explained the song and shown the pages the way I would in a classroom and still made her, not me, the center of attention.  But I used my time instead to do a disappearing act, diminishing myself but also diminishing the tribute to her!  I hadn’t even stood up.  And the idea that I didn’t want my head to be higher than hers is only one layer of the truth.

            This morning I read two articles about suicide in the newspaper.  One article, which was really about an exhibit featuring an essay, said that a million people die by suicide annually with a 60 percent increase worldwide in the last 45 years.  The other article was in the Health section with the headline “Suicide rates rise sharply among Baby Boomers.”  I  wrote in the reading journal I’ve been neglecting, “There are so many ways of doing yourself in.  You don’t have to commit suicide.  You can make yourself so small you almost disappear.  Turn your lights to dim when everyone else is shining brightly, almost blinding you with their bright lights. Stay seated when everyone else is standing commanding attention, being a star.”