Last Friday morning I was in my office at school getting ready for the morning's classes (periods 1 and 2), when I thought I would check Facebook quickly to see if one of my graduate students posted something in our class group there, and as I was just about to close the Facebook window, I caught a glimpse of the photograph of my friend Peter, and, as I had not heard from or about him for a while, I thought I would click on his picture to see what what's going on with him. And I was shocked to read that he had died. The post was by one of his sisters, communicating to her Facebook friends (and to his I believe) that her brother had just died. In a great state of disbelief and increasing grief, I wrote all of the condolence messages from her friends and from his, but I quickly began crying or rather weeping with my nose running and dripping onto my pants as I sat there remembering Peter more and more with each message that I read in which people expressed their feelings of loss and sympathy as well as their relationships with him. I also left a similar message on his sister's post. And then I remembered that I have to teach back-to-back classes starting in about 10 minutes. So I blew my nose tried to set this tragedy involving my friend away to the side, and I even physically made a gesture in the air of setting something to the side...
I had thought for a moment of telling my students what had happened, but I quickly realized that I would just start crying in front of them and they did not know Peter, and I did not want to make them feel sad or strange, so I decided just not to think about it just to throw myself into the classes. Luckily, the first class was an English conversation one, and the students are very motivated to communicate with each other in English, from what I can tell, and I have them doing brother exciting and energetic activity in which they had to ask 10 or more people in the class a single main question with some follow-up questions and Have a little conversation about the question and make a memo some of the interesting things people say to them. And it was rather shocking, when I happen to look up at the clock, and 80 minutes of the 90 minute class had passed already without my really being aware of it, and right when I looked at the clock I happened to make eye contact with one of the students and she also expressed surprise that the time has passed so quickly. So the class was fine and even fun. The next class was my American culture class with about 60 students, and for that one also I thought I was fine and covered various examples of big variety in American culture depending on where people live, and on what race and religion and political party they are, and so on and so forth, but at one point I happened to see three girls sleeping in the front row over by the window in the classroom and I became furious briefly and slapped the screen on which I was showing images of Democrats and Republicans and barked, "This is IMPORTANT! What political party you belong to really shapes your American culture and political parties are really necessary to understand American culture!" So I think the students were surprised by my sudden temper which blew it self out instantly I left me feeling ashamed... And after the class I wondered if my brief explosion of anger was part of my reaction to Peter's death. Luckily, those are my only two classes on Friday this year, and so after that I could be pretty much by myself most of the day. During the afternoon, I went back to Facebook and read through all of the comments after the post of Peter's sister, and I found another post by his other sister and read through all of those comments (and so began crying again...). I could reconfirm what a great guy Peter was, but I couldn't find anything about what had actually happened to him. Was it a health problem? An accident? A crime? It will always be a mystery. I met Peter in graduate school partway through our first year studying English language and literature at the University of Michigan. We didn't have any classes together the first year, but we hit it off well anyway somehow and before the start of the second year, he invited me to share his apartment, which would make both of our rent payments cheaper and would provide some good companionship. Because his apartment only had one bedroom, we decided to make a big screen to put in the living room behind which I would have my bed. So we drove in his car to some home improvement kind of store and bought a large pieces of thick heavy plywood and some white paint and drove back to the apartment somehow with the plywood sitting on top of the car held in place by our hands stuck through the open windows of the car, rather dangerously but without mishap. And then we used hinges and the paint to make a rather impressive folding screen which became my privacy for the year that we've been together the way. And this year we made a point of taking as many of the same classes together as we could including seminars in Greek Tragedy, American Contemporary Fiction, and Love Poetry. We really enjoyed reading and talking about great literature together and of course taking classes from great teachers with interesting classmates (we probably made fun of together too much when we were alone). We also played racket ball and listened to alternative music and ate together and generally had a great year earning our masters degrees. At the end of the year, Peter decided not to continue into the PhD program and left the UM to go to law school in NYC, while I continued and finally got my PhD. We kept in touch, and visited each other a couple times... once he came to Ann Arbor over Christmas holidays, while once my wife and I visited him in NYC. Then I got a job in Japan, while he became a lawyer and got married and we still kept in touch over the years.... The last time I spoke with him was on Christmas 2001, when he called to tell me that his beloved wife had been killed in the 9/11 attacks. After that, it seemed that Peter was trying to find a new way to live in the world without his life partner... he stopped being a lawyer and did other things and became a personal trainer for people trying to get in good shape... I regret now very much that I did not really ask him how he was doing over the following years. We did keep in touch and sent each other long Facebook messages about what we were reading and listening to and where we were traveling and what we were doing etc., but ... One thing about Peter that really impressed me and still moves me was that in the months and years following 9/11 when most Americans were so keen on war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, Peter remained a pacifist, though he had lost his wife on 9/11. I think that losing his wife that way made him not want anyone else to lose their beloved people. And so several years ago when I happened to tell him that our life partner/child/pet cat had passed away, he sent us a lovely condolence card with his empathizing handwritten message. ANYWAY, my Friday continued, and I couldn't go home and talk to my wife about losing Peter because I had made plans to have dinner with a former university and graduate school student and her friend from Belgium who had been a foreign student for a year in our university and had taken two of my classes and been a very interesting and nice person. I decided not to tell them about Peter for the same reasons I didn't tell my classes. And instead, I had a super Indian dinner with lots of talking about Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, philosophy, Europe, classes, relationships, and so on. I finally got home at around 11:00 PM. I still can't believe Peter is gone! I still partly wonder what happened to him and partly think it's irrelevant in the face of his not being physically in the world any more.
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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