Shivers

Jackie ♦ December 18, 2009 ♦ 5 Comments

I’ve got a wicked head cold, the kind that starts with a single sneeze, followed by another sneeze an hour or so later, followed by five or six wet sneezes in a row, and then all of a sudden your nose is red and chapped around the edges and you’ve got a little pile of used tissues near you everywhere you go.

I’ve also been having chills all day, as I juggled emails, students, all kinds of last-minute details before tomorrow’s half-day, which finishes the calendar year for us. Then I read a horrifying story in the local newspaper that included a name that rang a decade-old bell, and I had shivers of a different kind.

Ten years ago when I was in college, there was a woman majoring in the same field who was in a lot of my classes. She was a distinctive student: older (though younger than I thought), definitely a mom, the kind of older student who spoke up in every single discussion, but rarely in a way that moved the discussion forward productively. If I sound like I’m trying to be diplomatic, it’s because I am, because when I was a student, my friends and I inwardly groaned whenever we saw her enter the room on the first day of classes. She had a long ponytail streaked with gray and the kind of frame that is best described as skinny or scrawny, not slender or lithe or even slim, and she often wore sweatsuits and smelled a bit like cigarette smoke.

In my senior year, I served as a teaching assistant as part of my department’s honors program, and in a passing conversation, I mentioned her to the professor I was assisting, who told me briefly that she had a complicated life and that what was she was trying to do educationally was actually very brave and difficult. I can’t say I had a sudden epiphany of empathy, but I’ve clearly never forgotten her, and when I taught at the community college, I met more and more students that reminded me of her.

Today, her eighteen-year-old son stood in a courtroom and pled guilty to stabbing her to death in their apartment this spring. The last name was unusual enough to ring a bell for me, and I emailed that same professor and asked her if it was the same woman, and she confirmed that it was.

Clearly, the son is disturbed, and the brief description of the family history in the article is probably only the tip of the dysfunctional iceberg. I would not pretend to have known or understood her, like some of the professors we shared who I know are mourning her in truly authentic ways. But all the same, I have shivers, I feel haunted.

Rest in peace, Beth Skiratko.