Resurrection

Today, I go to church for the first time in six weeks. It’s Easter, and I have no excuse not to.

Still, I am uncomfortable, feeling discontented and alien and alone. I sit down in the first seat I see, near the back entrance where I came in – late, because I had decided at the last minute to go to the first service, then dawdled over breakfast and getting ready – and look up at the giant projected praise chorus, which is unfamiliar. This is not a surprise, considering my absences: eight years gone, then sporadic attendance at best. This congregation is one I hardly know at all.

I sing along, though not loudly, and let my gaze wander over the people also singing – then stop, on a man who looks, from the side, exactly like my high school English teacher.

But Mr. Caswell has been dead for three years, and it had been at least two before that since I had seen him. He died of cancer, probably lung cancer although I don’t know for sure – he was a smoker – and before I left for my second year in China, in a hotel room outside of L.A., I had written him a last letter. It was a meaningless letter, full of trivia and half-finished reflections on the previous year, because I didn’t know how to write what I meant.

I still don’t know how to write what I meant. Not without falling back on clichés.

The man who is not my teacher moves differently than Mr. Caswell had, his joints looser and his motions more fluid. The effect is obscene, as though someone else were wearing a Mr. Caswell suit. I turn away.

I remember, though, the afternoons after school and finding myself again in Mr. Caswell’s room, sitting there while he graded or talked with someone else, never quite sure what I was doing there, never quite sure whether I wished he would pay more attention to me. Sometimes he did, and we’d talk. He told me about his wife, also depressed, like my mom, and I would tell him about home.

He told me once about a Christmas – he was not religious, and neither was his family – when his family had gone out for Chinese food, he said, because it was the only restaurant open, and they were hungry. He loved it, being together, and the spontaneity. He loved it so much that every year after, he asked if anyone wanted Chinese food on Christmas. (But no one ever did.)

I wrote him letters practically every day, for over a year. I left them with him after class and he read them before the end of the day. I wrote, in one of the first, “I don’t know why I’m writing this to you.” He replied, writing in red pen on the edges as though grading an essay – and this was the only letter he ever replied to – “Kindred spirits, and I tell the truth.”

I am sitting in church, and I remember hitting the nine-year-old, and how the next day at school, Mr. Caswell came into my second-period chemistry class to make sure I was coming to his classroom for my study hall third period. I went, sat listless at one of the desks, put my head down, cried. Mr. Caswell sat in a student desk next to me and pulled mine over until we were face-to-face.

“I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but one day, this will fade. You’ll forget. That’s how things are.”

“I won’t forget,” I said.

He was right.

But I did not forget him. He seemed surprised when I visited on college breaks, as though he had thought I would cease to exist on graduation. When I said the last time that I likely wouldn’t be back – the school had instituted a new policy requiring badges for visitors – he said “Well, of course,” as though it were natural that I move on. As though he weren’t the closest thing I had to a father – or as though he was.

He said that secretly, Jane Austen was his favorite author. (Mine was Thomas Hardy.) He said that secretly, he was an optimist. (I was doom-and-gloom.) He said that secretly, he had been scared out of his mind during student teaching. (I never tried it.) I rehearsed these facts until they became second nature; I let them change me. They are still changing me.

I do not know how to conclude my thoughts on him, my best teacher, even though he’s dead, even though the world of what I will know about him has become finite and limited and the possibility of anything new has been cut off. So I won’t. I will remember what he was like the way I re-read my favorite books – with a new eye every time, with new experiences to inform my understanding. I will re-imagine our conversations and the tone of his voice and the gravity with which he signed my senior yearbook. I will reinterpret the way he laughed when I broke a solemn moment in class with some casual off-hand remark, or when he handed me an “extra” copy of a book I had loved, or when he gave me his address so that I could survive the summer through writing letters. I will recall his spirit and I will resurrect him every time.

I leave church, irritated and grateful, and hurry home to change and go to lunch. It will be ham, and my mother will want to know where I’ve been these several weeks, and we will eat candy – more than we should – and watch movies, and I will leave earlier than expected to clean my house. I will wash clothes and vacuum carpets and mop and gather papers into piles and put boxes in the attic. I will listen to music and sing; I will eat a late dinner. I will, secretly, be optimistic about the future, consider the merits of Jane Austen, dwell on the fear of trying something new.

It will be a good Easter, and I will be content, and not alone.