This Life Will Break You

I talk about abortion with my high school students, or about the losses on Civil War battlefields, or the movie Wit about John Donne’s poetry and the process of getting sick and dying. 

I watch my students very closely for their reactions to human tragedy: the dying of a sick toddler, the casualty of a father/husband on the battlefield, a cancer patient wasted away to next to nothing –

– do you see what I mean?

Year after year I watch the faces of my students as they witness all this in my humanities classes, and I scrutinize their emotional reactions. What are they thinking? Can I tell how they are feeling? What do their countenances say?

I don’t see much, most of the time. They seem to be relatively unmoved. I can’t tell.

I scratch my head and wonder.

Are they seeing the same thing I am seeing?

Why are they not floored? Why are they not crying? If this doesn’t make them cry, nothing will.

I wrote about this years ago, and I am revisiting it now.

Because the answer seems clearer to me now than almost four years ago: my high school students just don’t have the life experience to appreciate the magnitude of the tragedy they are witnessing. (At least most of them don’t.) They don’t really understand what is happening. Well, they understand the facts well enough. But they don’t have the emotional sophistication to fully appreciate the depth of emotions at play. That will likely change as they mature.

Because it is one thing to read about someone losing their life. It is another thing to watch a person die a violent death in front of you with your own eyes. It is a life-changing event to witness a family member macerate and die, in my experience.

After working for years in an emergency room while in college and immediately afterwards, and then watching up close my mom get sick and die of lung cancer, I was almost a different person than before. Or to be more accurate, I had an understanding of suffering, death, and mourning that I did not have before. An appreciation of the precious precariousness of life, and the tragedy of what happens in this world, came to me and never left. This was the crucible of manhood for me: I was changed.

So, in a sense, I was hearing notes of a music that my students were as of yet incapable of hearing. I should not be surprised. It is not their fault; it is natural. Life will teach them what I was unable to teach fully. Maybe I will have laid the groundwork which will help them to understand when they get older.

This world, it will break you.

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“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms