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William James Vande Kopple
Dec. 16, 1949 - July 3, 2013 |
"What is this advising appointment for, exactly?" I asked my RA, Julie, as we sat at our floor's self-proclaimed assigned table in the dining hall.
"You go into your advisor and tell him what classes you want to take for next semester and he'll tell you if he thinks it's a good idea. He'll probably suggest some different ones, and he might ask for a four-year plan, since you're a freshman."
"What is my advisor like?" My slice of pizza was in my hands, halfway to my mouth, where I had left it, forgotten in the midst of my confusion over this new revelation: Academic Advising was next week.
"Everyone has different advisors, depending on their major. Yours will either be an Education professor or an English professor; I'm not sure how secondary education advising works." She stabbed some more of her salad with her fork. "The most important thing is that you don't waste your advisor's time. You need to have a list of the classes you're going to take, and I'd suggest having a few alternatives lined up just in case. When you sign up for your advising appointment, notice how long the slots are. They're usually fifteen minutes or so; that's the longest your advisor wants them to go, no longer, so be sure you can get in and out of there in that time. Advising is a pretty crappy time for professors; students get two days off, but professors have two days full of meetings with students about things that don't really matter, so they don't get any extra time to work on class stuff or research stuff. They can get pretty crabby about that. Plus, a lot of students make Academic Advising into a super-long weekend, meaning they have to make their meeting times outside of the two allotted days, which kind of screws over their advisors. The less of a nuisance you can be to your professor, the better."
Julie bit off her spinach and tomato and turned to continue the conversation with one of the freshmen sitting nearby who had been listening in, but I wasn't paying attention anymore. When I got back to the dorm, I hopped on the internet and looked up my AER to find the name of my advisor. I spent the next two hours plotting out my next semester, trying to find the courses that fit best and that I would have the highest likelihood of getting into my schedule, since I would be registering for classes with all the rest of the freshman, after all the older students had already licked the plate clean.
I had lasted for at least a week longer than the rest of the student body, not worrying about advising and scheduling until it was almost too late to do anything about it. Julie's pep talk had shocked me back to reality: as I was a freshman and as my classes were pretty much picked for me by the time my turn to register came around, I hadn't thought much about registration, but I had been a people-pleaser since I was a kid in elementary school handing out christmas gifts to my teachers, and the idea of being a nuisance to my advising professor was terrifying and had to be avoided at all costs. The name listed on my AER was William J. Vande Kopple of the English department. When I looked him up on the English department website, I found out that he was, in fact, the chair of the English department. That meant that, on top of class work he had to do, on top of any research he had to work on for his department, on top of the advising he would have to do this week for dozens of students like me, he also had all of the work of the department chair, which I could only imagine was time consuming and important. He wasn't smiling in his ID picture, and I thought I saw sternness in his eyes and a touch of insanity in his hair. He seriously scared me, and I had to make sure I didn't piss him off during our first meeting. He was going to be my advisor for all my years at that school; I had to make sure I didn't screw up his first impression of me.
It was late October, and my walk from my dorm to his office in the Fine Arts Center was covered in orange and yellow leaves, brisk air, and the sights and sounds of a college campus come to life. It would have been a very pleasant little stroll if I hadn't been late and freaking out about the slightly crazy, disciplined old man I was on my way to meet. I didn't want to be sweaty or out of breath when I got to his office, so I half walked, half trotted down the paths, got mostly lost in what felt like labyrinthine hallways of the FAC and ended up taking the long way around the circle to get to the English Department. I asked the receptionist which way to his office and she pointed (in what I thought looked like a fatalistic, "I'm so sorry, honey," sort of way). I walked slowly until I saw his name in a sign outside the door. I heard muffled speech from within and saw the back of a student's head through the door's little window, so I found a chair to sit on nearby and waited, relieved that my tardiness hadn't been noticed.
Eventually the other student's meeting ended, leaving Professor Vande Kopple towering over me in the doorway--his head nearly touched the doorframe. He was rather lean, wearing a thinly striped short-sleeved button down that he had tucked into his beige slacks, belted at the waist by a dark brown belt that matched his shoes almost perfectly, though his shoes looked much more worn.
"Hello," he said, extending his hand. His voice was loud and low, booming but not in a yelling way, and I could feel it reverberate in my hand as I shook his.
"Hello," I said. "My name is Mary Healy."
"Right, and you must be a freshman. It's a pleasure to meet you. Come on in and sit down." There wasn't much room in the doorway for him to just step aside and usher me in, so he walked in and sat down at his desk chair and I followed.
The lights in the department office itself had been florescent, overhead lighting that felt like a cold, overcast day, but somehow the light in this littler office was different. What I could see of the walls was brick instead of cinderblock, and the rest was obscured by books. From floor to ceiling, metal bookshelves covered the walls, but were evidently still not enough to hold all of the books the professor owned, because many had spilled over into towering piles that stood next to his desk and the tiny table where I was expected to sit. The light was dimmer here, and though it still had that eerie hum of florescence, it felt warmer, like the daylight reflecting off the orange leaves outside, as if the soft yellow of the books' pages absorbed all the unfortunate side effects of the overheads, leaving only pleasant, soft reflections.
"So, what have you got for me, Miss Healy?" His desk chair was a little squeaky as he turned it to face me, his elbows on his knees. He had a printed copy of what looked like my AER in his hand. He had pulled it from a pile on his desk.
"Well, I have a lot of core still to go, so I was thinking I'd get my math and philosophy taken care of. I'm not very good at Math, so I was--"
He laughed.
It was almost like a bark, like a big, sudden "HA!" that really took me by surprise, and then it was followed by a couple little "ha"s that felt sort of anemic, like most of their energy had been stolen away by their aggressive older sibling, leaving them to just sort of bounce in the air in its wake.
"--looking at Math 100," I finished weakly.
"At least you know your weaknesses." He had leaned back in his chair, perhaps propelled by the force of his laughter. "What else?" He glanced down at the paper in his hands. "I see you're taking Japanese right now..."
I flushed. "Yeah, well, I'm...I'm not really enjoying it, so I was...well, I was thinking of switching to German."
Maybe I was just seeing things, but I could have sworn his eyes lit up when I said the word "German."
"Wellllllllll," he said, drawing out the word, "I would of course recommend German. It's a pretty small department, but it's a great program; I graduated with an undergraduate degree in German from Calvin."
"Oh really?" I was genuinely interested. In America, it's not every day you meet someone else who speaks German. "I took German all through high school."
"Really?" It was one of those questions that wasn't a question so much as it was an "Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle," sort of declarations. "So you won't be taking the introductory course then? You'll probably want one of the more advanced courses." Faster than I thought possible, he had pulled a small book off of one of the shelves closest to the computer on his desk. I recognized this year's course catalog as he flipped through it. "Yes, it looks like 216 is what you'll need." He frowned. "You might want to talk to one of the professors in the department, just to make sure that jumping in in the middle of the year won't be too taxing; this is a course that relates to the one that preceded it in the fall."
"All right, I'll do that." I wrote something down on my little piece of paper that I'd brought with me.
"So, German, Math, Philosophy...have you taken that required computer course yet?"
"No, I was going to take that over Interim if I could."
"Good plan. Any other courses?"
"I was thinking Poli-Sci for a core."
"All right."
I paused, wondering if I should be waiting for him to make some sort of judgement on that choice, but none seemed forthcoming, so I went on. "And Early British Literature. English 215."
"Yes, that should be a good one. If you're not able to get into it in time, I'm sure another survey literature course will fit into your schedule. Nothing to worry about there." He leaned all the way back at this point, his hands crossed behind his head, giving the appearance of both great ease and great chance of falling out of his chair backwards. "Early British Literature is some really good stuff. You'll read Beowulf, some Shakespeare, obviously, probably some Chaucer, all stuff you'll recognize from high school, probably."
For a second I forgot that I had been scared of this man not five minutes ago. "I actually didn't read any Chaucer in high school, or Beowulf."
He rotated his chair so that he was still leaning precariously far back, but now he was looking at me. "Really? That seems odd. Do you know why not?"
"I think other classes did, but I was in AP, so they had us do other things."
He nodded knowingly as he said, "Ah yes, AP. I like AP classes, I think, but I sometimes wonder if we're not giving up as much as we're getting by separating students out like that. I know some AP courses simply boil literature down into a big test you take, which is really an unfortunate thing."
I didn't know what to say to that.
"You'll probably read a few new things in 215, then. And I know Professor Saupe likes to throw some curveballs in that class, some things most students won't have seen before. Early British literature is her specialty, you know, so it should be quite the class. She's a very energetic teacher. Very passionate about her work and her students. You should really have a good time."
I still didn't know what to say, so I just said, "I'll look forward to it, then."
"So how are you liking college so far? Any complaints?"
I thought for a moment. "No, not really. I'm living in van Reken and we're a really close floor, so I feel pretty at home here."
"Oh, that's great. You like your roommate?"
"Yeah, she's really...nice," I said, dumbly.
"That's good. Dorm life can be sort of hit or miss. You know, you never know if you're going to wind up living with someone crazy, and it can really make college seem a lot worse than it actually is. So, van Reken. You're living in the new dorms then?"
Our conversation went on impossibly long, much longer than the 15 allotted minutes I had expected. And very little of it actually had anything to do with my schedule for next semester. When I left his office, he shook my hand again and said it was nice to meet me and that he hoped I had a good semester.
The spring of my sophomore year, Academic Advising came in April, just a little more than a month after the English Department's Writers' Retreat. The retreat had taken place at the University of Michigan's Biological Station on Douglas Lake, up very close to the tip of the southern peninsula, maybe an hour from the Mackinac Bridge. There had been Haiku competitions, a massive impromptu snowball fight out on the frozen water, interpretive snowmen, and a lot of hot chocolate and discussions about literature and its merits. It was a small group, maybe ten students, along with a few professors: Professor Saupe, Professor Fondse, Professor Hull, and Professor
Schmidt, as well as Professor Vande Kopple. Professor Vande Kopple's chief occupation for the weekend had been to read the poetry contest entries in that booming, expressive voice and then, after Professor Schmidt had counted the votes and declared that something was not going on to the next round of voting, to say, "Tough world," in his best impression of a "Get over it" attitude. It had been one of the best weekends of my life, and was certainly formative to the rest of my Calvin career. I am an introvert by trade, and I remember telling my boyfriend, who drove me to the vans to drop me off, "Why did I want to come to this? I'm terrible at meeting new people. I've changed my mind; I don't want to go. Just take me back to the dorm. I don't want to go." Thank God he didn't take me seriously. Thank God he talked me into getting out of his car. If I hadn't gone on that writer's retreat, I don't know what kind of person I would be today, but I do know that the following conversation wouldn't have happened in April, during Academic Advising:
"Miss Healy, come in!" Professor Vande Kopple's new temporary office in the Surge Building--where the English Department was waiting while the new Fine Arts Center was under construction--had a bit more room in the doorway for him to let me in around him. "Have a seat."
As with the other meetings we had had, I had brought a sheet of paper with a list of the classes I was going to take next semester. I waited for him to ask me what was on it.
"So, how about that writer's retreat? Was that not the best experience of your life?"
I smiled. "It was a seriously good time."
He laughed that "HA! (ha ha)" laugh of his. "Ohhhh," he said, drawing out the word, "It was one of the best weekends I've ever had. I really think that station was the perfect place to have it, too. I think we should try to get there next year, again. And those poems! I printed the winning entries and posted them outside my door, did you see?"
We talked for a little while about the weekend, recounting our favorite memories and making plans for next year. It took a while, but eventually he did ask me, "So what are you thinking for classes in the fall?"
"Well, I'm hoping to go to York next spring so I need to sort of jam my schedule with education classes if I'm going to graduate after four years."
"York, yes! My colleague, Dean Ward is over there right now. He's sent us some really excellent pictures. It's beautiful country out there. And it's so good to go abroad during college. It's the best time to do it, actually."
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking too."
"Who's going next year?"
"The classic's department, actually. The theme is 'The Legacy of Rome in Britain.'"
"Oh, so that will be Ken Bratt as your professor. A real angel of a man. Never met a better person, really."
That made me smile. I knew Professor Bratt as one of the heads of the Honors program who was also a mentor for my floor. He certainly was an angel of a man--I'd never met someone so kind and friendly and also so intelligent and articulate--but I would have never thought the professor to describe someone that way. "I agree," I said simply.
"My son did that trip back when the program went to London instead of York. He had nothing but good things to say about it. It's such a good opportunity for students; it's one of my favorite things about this college, that we offer so many opportunities like that."
"Yeah. I'm worried, though, about getting the courses I take over there to count for credit here."
"Oh, that shouldn't be a problem. The registrar's office can be a bit sticky about having things count for core, but if you need anything to count towards your English major, you just let me know and I'll just sign off on it, since I'm the department chair."
I raised an eyebrow. "Really? That's all I'll need?"
"Ohhhhhh, I meeeeeaaaaan, I would prefer if the course your substituting it for was somehow related, but I just think studying abroad is so important, I don't have a problem making some sideways-looking substitutions. And all the registrar's office looks at is my signature. Once you've figured out what you're going to take over there, just shoot me an email and I'll make sure they put it on your transcript." As an afterthought, he added, "Going to York in the spring does mean you'll miss next year's Writers' Retreat, though."
"Maybe I'll fly home for that weekend."
"OH! (ho ho) That might not be such a bad idea," he said with a laugh.
I'm not sure if we ended up actually talking about my fall schedule, but he signed off that we did, and I got into all my classes. In September, the English Department hosted its fall picnic that was themed as a hoedown. I wore a flannel shirt and a bandana and line danced with the other majors and minors, and watched and listened as Professor Vande Kopple made a fool of himself getting his left and right confused and "Yeehaw!"ing like he was reenacting Red River. I had another academic advising, though this time I didn't have a piece of paper with my anticipated classes on it. Instead I had a head full of plans for traveling over spring break and my questions about Europe and Britain. I did go to York that February, and I did miss the Writers' Retreat in March (and I did miss it).
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| This picture isn't from a Writers' Retreat, but it reminds me of the time I pummeled Professor Vande Kopple with a snowball right in the face. After the fact, he had, if you can believe it, a look that was even less dignified than this. |
I can't be exact on the time, but at some point in all those years, Professor Vande Kopple stopped feeling like a professor to me. It might have been when he leaned so comically far back in his chair that first time, or it might have been when he laughed so hard he couldn't read one of the more lewd limericks at the Writers' Retreat. It might have been when he tripped over his feet while line dancing and almost took the whole line down with him. Whatever it was, by the time I came back to campus for my fifth and final year, even though I wasn't taking any English classes that fall semester, I was making bimonthly treks to the FAC just to see him. I went to his new office, where somehow someone had found enough bookshelves that he no longer had piles threatening to crush him under their weight. I saw his pictures of his previous classes of student teachers, his pictures of him with huge fish he'd caught, his pictures of his children in their caps and gowns. Every time I'd come over unannounced, and when he saw me, he'd say, "Miss Healy! We've missed you! I have to say, I feel like you've abandoned us." The florescent lights still looked inexplicably warm in there, though I'm fairly certain now that it had nothing to do with the books.
That fall I went to advising like I always did, but since I was only taking one class in the spring--Professor Vande Kopple's Student Teaching Seminar--we just sat and talked. I'd signed up for a space that was surrounded by empty slots so that we could talk for as long as we could think of things to talk about. We discussed Calvin, life, books, England, teaching. We talked primarily about the latter, as my student-teaching experience was drawing ever closer and I was feeling ever more underprepared. I tried to find ways to draw confidence from him without having to admit my lack of it. After all these years, I still didn't want to appear weak in front of him.
I took the grammar interim with him that January, along with a handful of the other soon-to-be student teachers. After that, he called me "Mary Margaret," and whenever he was pretending to be cross with me, he would say it like, "Maaaary MAR-GRET," and I would laugh hard enough to not hear whatever else came after that. He had sage advice for all of us about our first week of school, about how to maintain strong but safe relationships with students, about how to survive the stress by deliberately spending time on ourselves and our own needs.
Once student teaching started, I saw him and my classmates every Thursday night for three hours. To a casual outside observer, it might have made sense to assume that I dreaded seminar nights, since they cut drastically into the time I had to work on grading or plan for future classes, or eat or sleep. But I never dreaded seminar. On the contrary; I needed seminar. Seminar reminded me why I was in that high school in the first place. My fellow pre-service teachers reminded me of all the good ideas I wanted to implement. They were like a refreshing pool I could dip my dry roots into and soak up thoughts without having to make any effort to think them. And when I felt overwhelmed, or when something had gone horribly wrong that week, I knew that 90% of the other teachers had felt the same way at some point recently, if they weren't feeling it exactly as I was.
I remember one Wednesday during the semester, a student of mine wrote something on one of her assignments that was clearly meant to make me feel bad for having assigned it in the first place. Now, several months later, I can look back and realize that she wasn't trying to hurt me as much as she did, that she was just a punk kid who thought she knew better than I did, and that I shouldn't have let it get to me the way I did. Because then, several months ago, I did let it get to me. It was hard not to; I was already pretty down because of all the stress and fear, and I had never felt very confident in my ability as a teacher. So when I read what she wrote, it took all of my effort not to break down and cry right there in class. When I had the chance, I wrote Professor Vande Kopple an email. I don't have a copy of it anymore, since I sent it from my high school account, but it was basically a confession that I didn't think I could do the teaching thing, that I had come to realize that I wasn't cut out for it, that I wasn't good enough, and that I was failing my students.
Looking back, it might seem like a completely insane, out-of-nowhere response to one student's rude little quip, but, in actuality, it was the confession of all the doubts I'd had for the past three years of educator's education. Since starting college, I had never felt 100% confident that I had what it took to be a teacher. Every step of the way, people showed me more and more ways in which teaching is harder than I used to think, and every step of the way, those hard things made me feel less and less qualified for the position. By the time I wrote that email, I was convinced that teaching was not just hard, it was too hard. It was too hard for me.
Professor Vande Kopple responded within the hour. Again, I don't have a copy of that email, but this one was easy to memorize:
Can you come in to see me in my office tomorrow before seminar?
Best wishes,
bvk
I went to his office about a half hour before class started the next day. I can't remember exactly how that conversation went, but I remember that I had to work to keep the tears out of my eyes, and when that failed, I had to work to keep them off my cheeks, and when that failed, Professor Vande Kopple stopped pretending he couldn't see them and handed me a box of tissues. He reminded me that both he and Professor Vanden Bosch had full confidence in me, that student teaching was always challenging and a massive culture shock, that I was as capable as anyone he'd ever instructed. There's probably a script somewhere that he wrote out for me and internalized because every time I went into his office after that, he had to say the same things over and over again. He'd write them to me in facebook messages and in emails, and every week when I'd come to the door for seminar, if I was on time, he would meet me outside the door and say, "How are we this week? Remembering how much everyone believes in us, I hope."
Eventually, student teaching ended and we all had a week before graduation, during which all the regular students were taking finals. During that week, I convinced professor Vande Kopple to take me out to lunch. We ate and talked about all sorts of things, and it was just like our advising conversations except moved beyond that warm office and into a place that smelled of ginger root and green tea. I was feeling anxious because I wanted to find a way to thank him for all the help and support he'd given me over the semester. I wanted to find a way to tell him that I couldn't have made it without him. But sometime during his little pep-talk about graduate school and professorships, my mind wandered and I realized just what an influence this big, lean, laughing, loud man had been for me all these years at college. I had known for some time that he was not just a professor to me anymore, but I hadn't really been able to pin down what exactly he was. Looking back over the course of my college years, I realized the pattern that had emerged. Slowly, but then all at once, he had become like a father. A father for when my other father was far away. A father for when I felt like a child who had gotten lost in the big department store of adulthood, a father who could pull me back into the boat after I'd fallen overboard into the sea of responsibility, a father who smiled when I smiled, who HA (ha ha)ed when I told a joke, and a father who handed me a box of tissues when I finally showed him my real weaknesses. He stopped being a professor a long time ago, but he started being a father when I realized I needed him to tell me it was all going to be all right.
I wanted to tell him all of that when he took me out to lunch. But I chickened out because it didn't feel quite right. The light wasn't right, the ginger root wasn't right, he was talking about graduate school and I wasn't really listening. So the moment passed.
I graduated not long after that, and I took pictures with my fellow teachers and with our supervising professors, and then I started to pack up my apartment. As I was packing, I realized that I still had two unit plans that Professor Vande Kopple had lent to me as touchstones for when I was creating my own. I needed to return them, so I went back to his office in the FAC.
When I got to the department office, I asked Becky, the receptionist (who, by the way, had never truly been fatalistic or "I'm so sorry, honey;" that had all been rather psychosomatic), "Is he in?" By now, I didn't have to say who I was talking about; she always knew who I was coming to see.
"He is, but he's with some other professors right now, and he told me that if you came to see him, to have you wait because he wanted to talk to you."
"Okay, that's fine." Again, I found a chair and waited. This wait was longer than that one all those years ago, and I busied myself with the many tiny-print dictionaries sitting on the desk in the waiting area. After probably a half hour, the professor-moot poured out of the office, laughing loudly at some joke I'd missed. Dean Ward and Elizabeth Vander Lei said hello and congratulations to me, and then Professor Vande Kopple, towering over me, walked me back to his office. I would never tell him this, but he looked ridiculous in his brightly colored t-shirt, tucked into his jean shorts that he had belted with the same brown belt, though it didn't match his jogging shoes.
"Mary MAR-GRET," he said, in the way that he'd taken to saying it after many consecutive iterations of pretending to be cross with me. "How are you?"
"I'm just fine, sir, and yourself?"
"I'm very sad that our class is over."
I smiled wistfully. "Me too. It feels very strange to not have any specific reason to wake up in the morning." I handed him the two unit plans. "I seem to have forgotten to give these to you."
"Yes you did," he said in a mockingly stern tone. "I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to return them."
"I also have this for you." I handed him a 5x7 manilla envelope on which I had written his name in scrolling script. Inside were several sets of Pilot G-2 pens, just like the one I'd given to him after having stolen one of his during seminar. He had said that he liked grading with that pen because the ink flowed so nicely, but that he felt odd writing in bright pink, so I bought him a whole rainbow of colors he could choose from, enough pens to last him at least a year if his writing habits stayed the same. Under the pens was one of my graduation announcements, on which I'd written a long note and tried to describe for him all the things I'd come to discover when we were in that restaurant. All that he meant to me and how much I appreciated him as my advisor and teacher, and how I was going to miss him after I left Michigan, and how I was going to email him all the time asking for advice, so he had better prepare himself.
He didn't open the envelope, but set it on his desk next to his keyboard and gestured for me to sit in that familiar chair next to that small, familiar table, in that office that had grown so familiar to me, with it's mysteriously warm light.
And we talked.
He asked me how my job search was going, and gave me advice about a school I'd applied to that was giving me weird vibes. He gave me step-by-step instructions about negotiating and accepting contracts from employers that I wish I'd written down, and he asked me what my immediate plans were for the summer.
"You know, I wasn't joking when I said I wanted you to come visit me in Pittsburgh," I told him.
"I'm glad to hear that," he said. "I wasn't joking when I told you that I'd give you $10 a week for as long as you were unemployed, to make sure you could eat at least one meal."
"And I will gladly accept that kind offer, as long as you come down and eat one of those meals with me. I'm not kidding about that."
"HA (ha ha)! Very good. I'm just glad you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with me."
After maybe an hour, we couldn't come up with any further excuse to keep talking, and he had some other meeting he had to go to, so we both stood up and I gathered my things.
"Hug?" he asked. He always asked because he was a teacher.
"Hug," I said quietly, with a smile. Yet again, this office was going to see me cry if I wasn't careful. But as I reached up to wrap my arms around his extremely high shoulders, I saw the shine in his eyes, too. And afterwards, I had to get out of that office, out of that department, off of that campus as quickly as I could. I couldn't linger; it hurt too much.
Now, though, I wish I had lingered. I almost wish I had stayed in Grand Rapids for an extra month, and I wish I had written down everything that great man had ever said to me. And, God, what I wouldn't give to hear that laugh again.
But on July 3rd, almost exactly a week after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, William James Vande Kopple died. Someone posted something about it on facebook, but I didn't see it because I was hanging out with family and friends. Instead, sometime in the late afternoon, my friend Mark called me. I was on my way to a swimming pool with my friend, Cari, and I normally wouldn't have answered, except that Mark doesn't usually call me, and I had this feeling it was important for me to pick up.
"Hello?"
"Mary Margaret, hi. It's Mark."
"Hi Mark! What's up?"
"I assume...I guess you haven't heard?"
"Haven't heard what?"
He didn't say anything. I thought I heard him sigh.
"Mark, what's wrong?" At this point, Cari pulled off onto a side street and parked the car.
"I don't know if I should be the one to tell you this...maybe I shouldn't have called."
"Well you have to tell me now. What is it?" I was mildly panicked on the inside. Had something happened to one of our friends? Or maybe it wasn't like that, maybe Calvin had burned to the ground? Or maybe someone was moving?
"Mary, I'm really sorry, but the Chimes put it on facebook earlier. Last week..." he took a deep breath. "Last week Professor Vande Kopple was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer."
"What?" I felt all the air go out of my lungs.
But he can fight it, a little voice told me.
If anyone can fight it, that big man with the big heart--
"And Mary...I'm so sorry, but he died this morning."
"What? No."
It was like a hammer hit me in the chest. It was like that feeling when you've been drinking a little bit and your legs get drunk first and for some reason they start to tingle and go numb before everything else. It was like when you go to the science museum and hold onto a electrostatic metal ball and your hair starts to frizz and you can feel your whole body humming. It was all of those things at once. I saw his face, I heard his laugh, I felt the warmth and the light and saw those worn brown shoes and all those books. And I was falling, bent at the waist, staring at my feet on the floor of Cari's car, far away, so far away, in a world that was so awfully different from the world that I had been blissfully living in just moments earlier. It was a hammer to my heart that immediately stopped beating. And I sobbed. And I sobbed like sobbing would bring him back. Like my proclaiming, "No, no, you're wrong," over a phone would mean that someone would take back this terrible joke they were playing.
I sobbed and I sobbed and after a moment I remembered that Mark was still on the phone and Cari was still in the car and I said to Mark, "Thank you, thank you so much for calling. It means a lot that you called. I have to go now."
"Of course. I'm so sorry, Mary. If you need to talk to anyone, I know I'm not the best person, but I'm here for you."
"Thank you so much Mark." I meant it, I really did, but I didn't feel the words coming out of my mouth. Someone much wiser and cooler than I was had taken over my body. Thank God for that person, too.
Cari didn't say anything. I explained that the professor who had been my advisor and student teaching supervisor had died unexpectedly. Cari said she was sorry, like Mark, she said she was here for me. She asked me if I wanted to go home. The real me didn't know what I really wanted. The real me was really numb and deaf and silent, so the wise, cool me took over and said, "No, I don't want to be alone." So we went to the pool, which was a half hour away. By the time we got there, it was close to closing time, so we decided to go home and that we could play video games together or something. But somewhere on the ride home, the real me checked back in and said that all I wanted to do was go home and cry. So the other me said wisely and coolly, "Cari, could you take me home?"
Cari, who has always herself been rather wise, said, "Of course."
I got home, I somehow made it upstairs to my mother's room where she was changing her clothes, and I burst through the door and blurted out, "Mom, Professor Vande Kopple's dead." My voice cracked and my consonants were stutters, but the real me was talking now and the real me could not care less how I sounded as I ran into her arms and let her hold me as I shook with audible and tangible fear and pain.
There was a visitation and a funeral, and I saw his lifeless, cold body in a casket during both of them. I talked with Jim Vanden Bosch, Elizabeth Vander Lei, Dean Ward, and Becky Moon, and we all worked so hard to keep from crying. We told bad puns and good stories and it was really a lovely weekend. But it wasn't the real me. Ever. The real me had to hide to keep from wailing like a banshee, like a smoke alarm, like a little girl who had had her heart ripped out of her. The wise, cool me was able to make that weekend work somehow, but after that, she disappeared.
Ever since that weekend, I have been living somewhere between the real me and the held-together me, fluctuating every now and then to one extreme or the other. The held-together version always feels like a thin candy shell that could crack at any moment, at which point the losing-it-completely me will come out again and want to curl up on the couch and sleep dreamlessly until I can somehow get back to that office where he will be waiting for me, scolding me for abandoning him.
Every job that has asked for a reference has killed him again. Every night I have gone to bed wishing I knew where my life was going has killed him again. Every paper I have found that has had his scribbles on it has killed him again. He has died so many times in the past two months, I'm not sure he lived enough lives to account for all his deaths.
He'll never come to Pittsburgh to have that meal with me. For some reason, I keep thinking about that. And for some reason, even though I have all sorts of evidence that he believed in me, I believe in myself less now than I ever have. It's like I needed him to be the positive side of me, the side that always knew I would graduate, the side that always wanted to be a teacher, even when things felt impossible, the side that kept dreaming and desiring, even after I felt shriveled and spent.
If I become a teacher now, I'll never get to tell him. And if I need help with unit plans now, I'll never get to ask him for it. And if I get knocked down by a punk kid, he won't be there to pick me up.
And yet he's the only reason I still want any of those things. I won't get to tell him, and I won't get his help, and I'll cry and cry and he'll never hand me any tissues, but I need to prove to myself those things that he kept telling me. I need to get to the point where I can believe in myself as much as he did. It's like I owe him that. When people say, about the dead, "She would have wanted..." or "That's the way he always meant things to..." I usually want to say, "We'll never know what she wanted because she's dead. We'll never know what he thinks about this situation because he never got to see it." I get angry at their presumption that they could possibly understand the inner workings of another human being. But now I think I understand that there are some things a person can obviously want, so obviously that, after their gone, the people who loved them want those things, too. And I want to be a teacher so that, if I do ever somehow get the chance, I can tell him that I tried and he can laugh and say, "Welllllllllll, at least you know your weaknesses.
But that day has not yet come, at least not for me. There's something present in the media coverage of this particular mass shooting that wasn't there in some of the other recent ones. (Caveat: I hate that we live in a world where I can compare mass shootings in a manner similar to natural disasters or national elections: they impact us all and come almost as frequently.) Various articles written about Rodger--specifically those that chronicle his history of simultaneously hating and lusting after women--bring up his participation in various forums on the internet, most notably one called PUAhate.com (I believe it has been taken down this week? I can't find it, anyway). For more on what PUAhate is and how Rodger was involved, click here, here, or here.
But even forums without an outright violent bend give me considerable pause. This is a livejournal post from years ago that hearkens back to an old forum I used to frequent: AntiShurtugal. The forum itself is no longer running, but it was a bastion of editorials and conversations discussing, negatively, Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series of books. Some time in high school, I went from moderately liking Eragon and its sequels to absolutely detesting them. (For the record, I believe it was a relatively slow descent, and it probably had at least a little to do with the fact that I was a teenaged writer who felt trapped in an inability to publish my books.) I briefly found a community of like-minded people in AntiShurtugal: these people would write long articles analyzing the series piece by piece, tearing it apart for its lack of artistry, for its plot holes and inconsistencies, and doing so joyfully. I don't know that I made many contributions, but I consumed others' like water in a desert.
