The View From Planet Kerth: Sometimes there is karma even in kraut juice

It’s nice to be reminded who you are. Especially when you don’t know anymore. That’s what happened to me when I got the email from Liz W, a former student I haven’t heard from in almost 25 years.

Back then, I was a high school English teacher, soccer coach and newspaper adviser, and Liz was (by her words) “a melancholy newspaper kid who lacked focus and ambition.”

Because of health issues I knew nothing about, Liz was depressed much of the time. But the newspaper office was a whimsical home-away-from-home for a lot of kids, and she reminded me of frantic deadline-day details I had long forgotten: “junky pizza, listening to Frampton Comes Alive … and Frank’s Kraut juice.”

But despite the whimsy, high school was for Liz “an unpleasant experience at best. I shut down emotionally and academically. I planned to graduate early and become a beautician. I just wanted out. Yet you wouldn’t allow this. Through some informal conversations throughout my senior year you planted a seed in my head that took root and blossomed into something so much more than I could have comprehended at the naïve age of 17. You posed the following question to me: Why not just try college for a semester? You have nothing to lose.”

To be honest, I had forgotten all this. I remembered Liz, but she was one of many — perhaps 10,000 students over the course of a 33-year career.

Besides, although I once defined myself as a teacher first and foremost, that was a lifetime ago.

And it all changed in an instant.

Just two years after I retired from teaching, my wife’s health took a rapid decline, and I became her caregiver. For four years it was trips to Mayo Clinic for heart procedures, and then for major surgery to treat an aggressive, life-threatening cancer.

And then, in 2010, she was so disabled by strokes that I became her full-time caregiver, and any other life I previously lived vanished in an instant.

Because of my caregiving duties, I had no time to visit the school I once “lived in” 12 hours a day as teacher, coach and newspaper adviser. I lost touch with virtually all former students and colleagues, other than a handful of devoted friends who refused to let me vanish from their lives.

If you asked me “Who are you?” I would have said: “I am a caregiver,” all other definitions thrust aside by my wife’s needs at any hour of day or night. Teaching was now just a distant memory, visited only in fading images.

This February, my life as caregiver ended when Gail suffered a final, fatal stroke on Valentine’s day — the same day as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

A month later at a remembrance rally in Florida, I stood in the park and wept for all the lives that had ended — those of the Parkland students, and of my wife, but also my life as a teacher, and as a caregiver.

And I found myself wondering: Who am I now?

No answer came to mind, only the question that echoed in the emptiness — until that note from Liz W helped me to find myself once again.

In her note, Liz brought me up to speed with her journey since I last saw her: She tried a semester of college. And then another, and another …

She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree with honors, and then a master’s degree. She became a teacher and newspaper adviser, and she authored a 250-page book linked to Advanced Placement courses. Somewhere, she also found the time to marry and become the mother of two beautiful children.

And, she wrote: “There is not a day that passes in which I do not think of your role in my life and attempt to emulate it with my own students. While the lessons you taught me took place 25 years ago, they have followed me throughout my life. My life is fulfilled in ways that were unimaginable to me a quarter-century ago.”

Call it karma if you will, but there is something profound about being a man going through the lowest point in his life, and then getting a note from a long-ago student writing to thank him for showing up at her lowest point to nudge her onto a better path.

Liz reminded me that my life as a teacher never died. Those long-ago daily lessons still live on today in her teaching, and they will live on through her students for generations to come.

And I am stronger today because Liz wrote to tell me that once, long ago, I helped her find the strength to persevere just a bit longer on the path to find out who she was destined to be.

Today, all across America, another school year is ending. Students and teachers are exhausted. They are glad to be rid of each other for a summer at least, and maybe longer. They might even say they are sick of each other.

But a day will come for each of them, years or even decades farther down the road, when they will look back and see how important their time was together. And it will not be the content of school-book lessons — learning to diagram a sentence, or to solve an equation, or to understand causes of the Civil War — that will mean the most to their life’s journey.

No, it will be the simple gestures — a heartfelt “Good morning” when your morning wasn’t really all that good, or a pat on the back for a good effort, or even a can of Frank’s Kraut juice with Frampton playing in the background — that might be the hinge upon which a life turns.

And it will never be too late, not even a quarter-century later, to reach out and say: “Thank you!”

So: Thank you, Liz. You lifted me up by reminding me that once, long ago, I lifted you up.

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The author splits his time between Southwest Florida and Chicago. Not every day, though. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Why wait a whole week for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Get T.R.'s book, 'Revenge of the Sardines,' available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine online book distributors. His column appears weekly.