Life Is Forever
by Roberta Simpson Brown
When Kim joined our faculty at Southern Middle School in Louisville in the early nineties, I never saw a healthier young woman. She was a young wife and mother of one daughter, Sarah, with responsibilities at home, but she never ran out of energy at school. We all loved her as a friend and teacher.
We both got to school early, so we would meet in my room for coffee and bagels while we talked about what our team of teachers would be doing for the day. She adored her daughter and always had some “Sarah Story” to share. So I was especially shocked one February morning when she had something different to tell me.
“I don’t want you to be concerned, but I have to be out of school for a few days,” she said. “I have been really tired lately, and now something is sticking in my throat. It’s probably nothing, but the doctor wants me to go into the hospital so he can check it out.”
She was wrong. It was something none of us could have imagined. Tests showed a malignant tumor wrapped around her heart and extending into her throat. The few days of absences turned into months as she went through surgery and chemo. I send her cards and letters every day through the mail so she could keep up with what was happening with our team. I did not use E-mail back then.
Kim returned to teaching when school opened in the fall, but she had to take radiation treatments. I used to beg her to stay home, but she’d say, “I don’t want to do that. I want my life to be as normal as possible. I want to teach.” She had to struggle to make it through each day. She didn’t worry about dying. She just couldn’t bear leaving her little daughter.
“I don’t want her to remember me as a sick mother,” she said over and over.
Then the treatments ended and she waited for the results of the tests to see if the cancer was gone. She told her husband to come to school and give her the news, regardless of whether it was good or bad. As we took our students to lunch that day, I saw him standing at the bottom of the stairs. One look at his face told me what I didn’t want to hear. I quickly took our students to the cafeteria while Kim and her husband went to the main office. I hurried to the office just as they were leaving. I barely had time to hug her and say goodbye. It was the last time I saw her alive.
Now that she was out of school again, I wrote her again every day. Then in December, I got a call from her. She was going into the hospital and the doctor told her to get her affairs in order. She had called to say a last goodbye. I don’t know how we got through that conversation without breaking down, but we did. We spoke of what we had meant to each other and that we would be friends forever. We both said, “I love you” and then hung up.
The last day of school before Christmas break in 1996 arrived. Kim was in the hospital, in and out of consciousness. That morning, I stood by my classroom door on hall duty, looking across the hall toward her old classroom. Students hurried down the hall to their lockers before homeroom started. Suddenly, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Kim was standing outside her classroom door, looking radiant and watching the students go by. I knew then that she had died during the night. I inched my way to the teacher standing at the next door and said, “Kim’s here. I’m sure she died last night, but she’s come to say goodbye.” She looked where I pointed, but more students passed as we got a last glimpse, and then Kim was gone. A call from the office confirmed her death, and we all settled down in class to grieve and write our thoughts in our journals. The silence was broken by a knock at my classroom door. The students looked up as I opened the door. An office aide was standing there with a large Christmas gift for me. I learned later that Kim had shopped before she went into the hospital and, not knowing that would be the day of her death, had asked that the gift be delivered the day before our Christmas break.
“Open it!” the students urged.
They all watched as I took out a green, hand painted wooden Christmas tree. It had red candle holders attached and candles in a little tin box that had on it the words, “Friends Forever.”
“It’s just like she’s here,” they said. I agreed as I put up the tree in our classroom.
Until I retired at the end of 1999, I put up the tree every year so students could come by and share memories. To this day, I have the little tin box on my desk at home. One of the teachers suggested we collect happy stories about Kim for her daughter Sarah so she would not remember her mom as just being sick. We had the stories bound in a booklet that Sarah could keep.
I didn’t go back to school for quite some time after I retired. When I did go back, I had a very eerie experience. As I walked through the door, I was transported back in time. It was 1996 again, and all of us, including Kim, were there together. The classrooms were the same and the voices I heard were those of our students from our past days together. I felt like several dimensions existed sided by side. I wanted to turn back time and relive the good times. Suddenly some students from the present came around the corner, and time shifted back. I stood there for a moment letting it all sink in. I knew life was eternal. Kim and all the others I had loved in my life who had crossed over were very near, and they always will be until I join them someday.
Death is not an end, but a beginning. Life is forever.
