The harsh reality of childrens' funerals

There’s no getting around it; if you’re making a career in teaching, you are, sooner or later, going to be at the funeral of someone who died way too young. Or multiple someones who died way too young. Yesterday I attended the visitation for a kid who died way too young. He was a teacher down in Walkerton, where I put in a few years early in my teaching career. I wasn’t particularly tight with him, but on account of having worked with his Mom for many years, I felt a sense of duty. He might have been a teacher, but he was barely ten years older than the four highschool athletes who died with him in the car he was driving. This kind of stuff leaves scars in these small rural communities. My initiation into teen funerals came when one of my kids tragically died in a snowmobile accident early in my career. That was followed a few years later by an entire carload of recent grads, all former students, racing a train to a level crossing… They lost. Life’s a crap shoot. Some people win… …and other people win until they don’t.