Elizabeth Stone is a teacher and journalist and the author of BLACK SHEEP and KISSING COUSINS: HOW OUR FAMILY STORIES SHAPE US. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and teaches writing and literature at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University in New York. |
THE STUDENT
(Editor's Note: Elizabeth Stone is a teacher. Vincent was her student. When Vincent died he stipulated in his will that his diaries be sent to his old high school English teacher. Elizabeth was surprised, but what surprised her most were the lessons she learned from her old student. We asked Stone to tell us something about what she learned from Vincent.)
What was your reaction when a carton of diaries was delivered to your doorstep?
Before I actually let myself examine the diaries--ten years' worth as it turned out--I found the enclosed letter Vincent had written to me. "Dear Elizabeth," it began, "You must be wondering why I left you my diaries in my will." I hadn't even known Vincent was ill because, for the previous twenty years, he had lived in San Francisco while I had lived in or around New York City. At that moment I read his letter, I was struck by the dizzying fact that here was a living man telling me he was dead . . . here was a dead man writing me a letter.
What else was in the letter? Didn't this seem an odd request?
Many of my friends did say they would have felt angry and burdened by his request, but oddly enough, I didn't. Vincent had been special to me when he was in my ninth-grade English class. In fact, my experiences with him--his curiosity, his vulnerability, his intelligence--were factors in my decision to commit myself to teaching. After that year, he faithfully sent me annual Christmas cards, but he never answered any of my questions about him. In all the intervening years, he'd only told me three facts--that he worked in the insurance business, loved travel, and loved photography. So when the diaries arrived, I saw them as a gift, as his fullest possible answer to my questions about his life.
Do you understand why he left his diaries to you?
Not really, except that he imagined me in a way that helped him and that stayed with him. I think what happened to me happens to teachers a lot, often with students they never even suspect they touched. To this day, I still think about three teachers I had--Mrs. Rappaport in third grade, Miss Tannenbaum in high school, and Professor Robinton in college. In hindsight, all three were very influential both in building my confidence and in serving as models, but only one--my college professor--ever understood how important she was. I didn't even understand until much later on in my life. I'm sorry that my grade school and high school teachers never knew how much they meant to me.
What was your experience actually reading Vincent's diaries?
We're talking about 3,500 pages here. At times, I was bored, and at times, I did judge Vincent harshly--and my family got really tired of him as a daily presence in our household. They thought of him as the man who came to dinner. But in the end I was grateful to Vincent because he became my teacher.
He became your teacher?
Well, yes. I was not particularly good at dealing with death, especially the death of people close to me. In the earliest years of Vincent's diaries, the death of his closest friend left him numb. That reaction was familiar to me. But as he went on, and as he got closer to death himself, Vincent opened up. He solved the mystery of how to maintain a vital connection to the dead people in his life. In going through that process with him, I found myself changed.
He lived in San Francisco, where death was an explicit concern of his whole community. Most of us don't live that way.
No we don't. Death is usually a private matter. But at certain times in history, death becomes a public matter. The stages of grieving, and after that, memorialization, go public, too, and seep into us privately as well. That was true during World War II and the Vietnam War. It was true when Kennedy was shot and then Martin Luther King. And the AIDS epidemic made it true again. The monstrous and bewildering attack on the World Trade Center once again made grieving and memorializing a very public as well as private matter.
By the time you wrote your last page, what had you learned?
Vincent and I were not intimates, but it was from him that I understood that relationships aren't frozen at the moment of a loved one's death. Relationships can evolve even after death. Though they're between us and another person, their stage is inside each of us, and it's always lit. I had last seen Vincent when he was a fourteen-year-old boy, but through reading his diaries, I developed a relationship with the man Vincent became, a relationship far more substantial than my relationship to the boy had ever been. It makes me happy that I had that opportunity. From Vincent, I learned that there is a terrain beyond mourning.