A mentor of mine died this week.
Forgive my lack of writing on here. I’ve had a busy month and in particular, I had a long week, for the good and the bad. The good being I got inducted into my colleges English honors society and that I performed in my first college theatre production. The bad being that I sprained my ankle in the process and have been walking around with a limp for days and then I have a lot of built-up exhaustion from the long night of dress and tech rehearsals. But to cap off such a week, I received a call from a friend of mine from high school.
I noticed my phone buzzing in my mad dash. What’s this? I haven’t spoken to them in a while…is this to check in? A butt dial? No, it’s ringing all the way through. Something is wrong. I didn’t answer initially since I didn’t have time to talk, but when I had a brief break, I texted them back, asking what was going on.
“i’ll call you later, not something to say over text
prob tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, I had a feeling that this was about almost immediately, but I didn’t want to admit it. It sounded too far-fetched. See, this friend of mine, and I were both in the same advisory in high school. Once a day, we would sit in the same classroom for ten minutes and talk to our assigned teacher or ‘advisor.’ We both shared a love for our advisor, and many of our conversations reflected on our ten minutes in that classroom. Whatever happened had to be about him.
I panicked in the madness of my day and used my brain to stop time for a moment. I didn’t care what was coming up next in my schedule. To get a text like that sends fear through you that I would not wish on anyone. So I called them.
“Hey. You may want to sit down because this is really shocking, but um…Mr. Williams died.”
It felt wrong to cry at that moment. I almost immediately started crying out of pure shock–nobody knew (and at this time, nobody still knows) what happened. He was young and kept his personal life private from his advisees, but you still want to know what happened just to have peace of mind. I called my sister in tears. She was in a Marshalls and had to leave, so it didn’t look like she was a crazy person. Even my parents checked in when they heard.
In 2019, when my grandmother passed, my dad wrote a really beautiful piece about how he handled his grief on his blog, ShakespeareGeek. And I suppose I really am my father’s daughter because my response to this grief is the exact same. Write about it. So here I am.
I felt a profound wave of emptiness throughout the rest of the day and, frankly, into today. This is the second loss of someone close to me, the first being my grandmother. I haven’t lived long enough to experience the inevitable deaths of those who are either currently close to you or were sometime long ago. I’m not sure if this emptiness is the 20-year-old who doesn’t know how to process death, the 17-year-old who finally found what makes her happy after skipping anatomy too many times to sit in his office or the 15-year-old who proudly signed her own book him to hang in his house or the 14-year-old who hated her new high school and found an adult who didn’t give up on her. Maybe all at once.
High school for me was the usual high school experience: kind of horrible, with some happy moments thrown in there. I only recently, in college, started receiving help for the crippling anxiety and depression that I had, so reflecting on things I got upset about when I was 14 looks so dramatic. And that was always my worst fear, to be too dramatic and look like I was being an attention seeker. But to Mr. Williams, I was never dramatic. In every conversation I had with him, he gave me some of the most genuine advice that I have carried with me to this day. This man truly gave me more helpful advice than the first two therapists I had.
To know him was to be seen, to be validated, and to be welcomed. Even when I wasn’t complaining about something that was earth-shattering to me, he was someone I could have a conversation with. The issue I always had with connecting with teachers and mentors was the sense of formality. I was never going to develop a bond with an adult that I had to begin my emails with “Dear XYZ,” and close them with “Sincerly, Liz Morin.” I certainly respect them, but it’s very hard to feel seen when you’re more worried about not coming off as disrespectful.
I would often have conversations with him, such as one that I titled, “Not an ulcer,” due to my fear at the time that I had an ulcer. He simply responded, “YAY!!! 😀😀😀” and that still makes me laugh to this day. Or when I passed my driver’s test after weeks of bothering him in his office during my free periods about how nervous I was for it, and he told me how proud of me he was and then sent me a clip from a movie I now forget about someone getting their driver’s license. But the important part was he always closed his emails by telling me how proud he was of me. And to teenage me who never thought I was good enough (and even me now), that meant so much more to me than I probably let on to him. I wish I screenshotted more of our emails before my account was deleted.
In my senior year, I had a 17-year-old going off into an adulthood crisis. Not only was I clinically depressed, but I had just committed to a college that I did not want to go to, on top of even more personal stuff. I remember discussing in advisory (we were all very close by senior year) about how I wanted to quit dance because I was miserable.
“Well if you know dance makes you miserable, can you think of what makes you happy?” he had said.
“I don’t know, writing I guess-“
“No. I mean what makes *you* happy. We’ve had conversations about how you feel about writing. There’s a difference between what makes you happy and what makes other people happy. Dig deep. Find that.”
(for context, my relationship with writing is very on and off. You get the gist.)
My memories of high school are concerningly foggy, but that is a conversation I have held with me ever since. Something that I am still trying to find–it turns out this is a much longer process than you let on, Mr. Williams, damn.
And even though it is a journey that I am still on, it is that advice that led me to leave dance to start running. I never predicted myself dancing once I left school, but today, I run every day, and I’ve even run a half marathon. By quitting dance, I also discovered my passion for weightlifting, something I would never have found if I hadn’t quit. And while, no, I did not end up going to UVM, I finally found happiness at the school I was really, really not looking forward to going to. I wish I had told him about my discovery of the theatre program here. I wish a lot of things.
We stayed in contact for a bit after graduation. When I say my finding help for my depression started in college, I mean more junior year (a.k.a. This year). My freshman year was bad. And when the description of bad gets into your head, triple it. And set it on fire. I was miserable, and I wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball and die. A close friend of mine from high school suggested I email Mr. Williams. I thought that would be strange since I graduated, but she pointed out how close we had been and that he probably wouldn’t think it was weird. And he didn’t. In fact, he sent me back a five-paragraph email in response to my depressive rambling–this is one of the emails I wish I screenshotted. But I remember feeling so much more at peace knowing that I wasn’t entirely alone in a new state where I felt completely isolated.
Our conversation went back and forth for about a year. I enjoyed hearing about his escapades at my high school and appreciated that he could now complain about his grievances with his job now that I wasn’t his advisee on paper. It truly felt like I was speaking to a mentor. And that’s what I consider him. He was a mentor, not in an academic or career sense, but in a way that he guided me through my formative high school years mentor. Without that sense of support that he gave me, I would not have been sitting here, finally having found peace within myself and the environment I am in.
Our email chain ended because of his lack of reply. But I never blamed him. It was right around when my high school’s annual musical was happening, so I’m sure he was busy. In his last email to me, he gave me his personal email. I never used it. And as I write this, I am filled with dread that I never did. To be honest, I was a little embarrassed to reach out back to back and look like that kid who couldn’t move on from high school. I did plan on emailing him when I finally finished my second book, though, but I suppose I’m too late now. I felt like I needed to grow up and move past my life in high school, which I did and I mostly have done. But there are so many things I wish I could tell him now.
I wish I could tell him that I’m going to graduate college early. And that my long-awaited second book, which he mentioned in every email he sent, is done and is, yes, 900 pages long. I wish I could tell him that I joined the theatre and acted in shows despite the crippling anxiety I had in high school–I know he would laugh at that. I wish I could tell him that I discovered my love for journalism and was the Opinion Editor of my school’s newspaper as a freshman. Or how I stood up for myself and left a position that I felt was acting unfairly to take control of my own journalism education. Or how I got an internship and how I’m studying for the LSATs. These are all things I will regret not telling him for the rest of my life. But from what I’ve heard, regret is a normal part of grief. You will always grieve what you didn’t say to them while they were alive. That being said, I’m going to let myself regret it for a few days, even though it makes me sad. Because it’s okay to feel sad when you lose someone who made such a profound impact on your life. He will always be missed. Thank you for changing my life, Mr. Williams. I hope I helped you as well.