On Friday, I attended the funeral of a woman who worked with my students as a PE teacher once a week. She'd been doing this for several years. I didn't know her well ~ she provided part of my planning period, so I rarely got to spend any time with her. She also sold jewelry, by catalog, once in a while. She died on June 1st, in a one-car accident on the freeway, near my school.
We found out the next day, the day she would have been there to teach PE. The principal asked us not to tell the students; he wanted to do that. For a variety of reasons, he didn't do that until June 7th. My kids seemed to be okay with the news. Some had already known, or suspected. I fielded a few questions on Monday and Tuesday, before the official announcement.
This woman ~ call her Sandy (not her real name) ~ was not well liked by my students. They often complained that she was mean, and I had heard that in other years as well. She did tend to yell at them, but then, they were outside, often far apart, and more often than not, being noisy, so maybe it was just raising her voice to be heard.
She seemed to be a lonely person. Sandy was the sole support of her widowed brother and his two sons, I know. She approached me, this year, about going to some baseball games at a local stadium. Not major league games, not even, I think, minor league. I'm still a bit vague about it. I was stunned when she asked me, since, as I said, I didn't know her very well. I was sick at the time, and told her I'd think about it and get back to her. She was dead before I did. I still have no real idea of why she would ask me. I'd never given any indication that I would be interested in going to any sort of athletic event. My teaching partner was, and is, a much more likely candidate for that sort of thing, and she was sitting with me when Sandy asked me.
There were rumours about her death. I heard that it was suicide, that she was despondent over a meeting at the district when she was chastized about some harsh words she'd said to students. I don't know if that is true. She had a Catholic funeral, so I doubt the official verdict was suicide, given their stand on that.
The funeral, though, was odd. There was no body, for one thing. If she died on June 1st, and her funeral was June 10th, there was certainly time for the body to be released, at least I think so. I suspect that there was an autopsy, given that it was a single car incident. They'd be looking, no doubt, for any medical reason for her to crash into a post on the freeway. (I can't remember what they call those things that support overpasses) I do know that she was going fast enough at the time to damage the post badly enough that the county had to send a crew out to inspect the post to see if it was still sound enough to support the weight of the overpass.
Sandy had a fairly large family. Her parents, 1 sister, 2 brothers, 2 nephews. One of the nephews gave the eulogy ~ which was also odd. It wasn't personal at all. He read a paper she'd written many years before, about her goals in her pursuit of a degree in adaptive physical education. It was dry and impersonal, and her nephew added nothing to it, except to say his aunt would be missed. No other family member spoke.
It was all a little unsettling. Her death, the district's handling of notification, the funeral. Odd. I don't like funerals in general, but I've never been to one that left so many questions behind. Or one that didn't have a body. The priest mentioned it, but gave no reason for not having it there. Didn't say it had been cremated, but even if they were going to do that, it's customary to do so after the funeral. Where is it? Why hasn't it been released to the family? Did they find something medical? Was it suicide? What happened to this woman who has been a part of our school's life, and many other schools' lives, for so many years? And why didn't her family say anything personal and sympathetic about her? Three of them depended on her for their financial support. They couldn't find anything nice to say about her? This whole thing has left me very unsettled.
Maybe it's just me. I've been sick with pneumonia and pernicious anemia for the last month or so, not working for much of it, hospitalized for a large part of it as well, or home on doctor's orders for bed rest, in between all the tests I've been subjected to. It's left me feeling a bit out of it, at best. So, maybe it is just me.
