Dusti, I told you I'd tell you the whole story later, so here it is.
I will never commit suicide. The ghost of Betty Schwartz would come to haunt my ghost, and lecture me again and again on the beauties of life and love, and the usefulness of pain in developing inner strengths. If there is any kind of afterlife, I am convinced of the power of this woman's spirit to find mine and torment me eternally.
She was a dear Teacher of mine, in High School, a gaunt (wow, that word is inadequate) skull-eyed, frizzy-haired corpse stick of a woman, who very lively, taught an honors-level English Lit. course titled, appropriately, "Values of Life and Death". Personally, she had been diagnosed some many decades earlier with terminal cancer, and been told (at that time) that she had six months to live. She lived. Way past. With verve and tremendous self-restraint.
Our one field trip during that class was down to the mortuary, to see her coffin (with a terminal diagnosis ongoing, she'd seen to such things early). It was a plain unornamented pine box, and she mourned that the hinges weren't available in something less flashy than brass. Like, iron, or steel, perhaps. She did not believe in ostentation (with one exception).
She was by far the most rigorous, demanding Teacher I'd ever had, and there were several excellent ones which I had - Dotty Icove and Pat Lefferts also had tremendous impact on me. But Betty Schwartz started out with: "My name is Betty Schwartz, and I am a Victorian prude. You may call me Miss Schwartz. If you call me anything else, I might choose to fail you." Members of the staff of the Literary Magazine, the Phoenix, were entitled (because thereby, she had acknowledged your contribution as equal to her own - if the whole class had managed to get onto the staff of the Phoenix, she'd have been delighted) to call her, "Betty", regardless of wheres and whens.
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branchandroot
An Ode to Betty Schwartz, a Teacher of mine.
Date: 2012-09-15 04:11 pm (UTC)I told you I'd tell you the whole story later, so here it is.
I will never commit suicide. The ghost of Betty Schwartz would come to haunt my ghost, and lecture me again and again on the beauties of life and love, and the usefulness of pain in developing inner strengths. If there is any kind of afterlife, I am convinced of the power of this woman's spirit to find mine and torment me eternally.
She was a dear Teacher of mine, in High School, a gaunt (wow, that word is inadequate) skull-eyed, frizzy-haired
corpsestick of a woman, who very lively, taught an honors-level English Lit. course titled, appropriately, "Values of Life and Death". Personally, she had been diagnosed some many decades earlier with terminal cancer, and been told (at that time) that she had six months to live. She lived. Way past. With verve and tremendous self-restraint.Our one field trip during that class was down to the mortuary, to see her coffin (with a terminal diagnosis ongoing, she'd seen to such things early). It was a plain unornamented pine box, and she mourned that the hinges weren't available in something less flashy than brass. Like, iron, or steel, perhaps. She did not believe in ostentation (with one exception).
She was by far the most rigorous, demanding Teacher I'd ever had, and there were several excellent ones which I had - Dotty Icove and Pat Lefferts also had tremendous impact on me. But Betty Schwartz started out with: "My name is Betty Schwartz, and I am a Victorian prude. You may call me Miss Schwartz. If you call me anything else, I might choose to fail you." Members of the staff of the Literary Magazine, the Phoenix, were entitled (because thereby, she had acknowledged your contribution as equal to her own - if the whole class had managed to get onto the staff of the Phoenix, she'd have been delighted) to call her, "Betty", regardless of wheres and whens.