I’m a big believer in signs.
Providence. Serendipity.
Whatever you want to call it.
This weekend is our high school’s equivalent of homecoming, and yesterday two Distinguished Alumnae came to speak to the Senior Girls to kick off a weekend of activities. One of the women is celebrating her 40th reunion, and the other her 50th.
Both have had rich, diverse lives and careers, and each spent a certain number of years teaching English Literature. I know and respect them both, but somehow the fact that they’re former English teachers had slipped to the back of my mind. Wow, two English teachers–that’s cool.
What was even more cool was that each of them referenced texts that have been in my peripheral vision for a while now. Stories I’ve been trying to get to, knowing that they had something I needed.
The first women quoted The Tempest, which keeps coming up in my life these days, and is a play I’ve been feeling I don’t know well enough. She cut right to the moment when Ferdinand is bemoaning the apparent loss of his father at sea, and the spirit Ariel tells him:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
[I.ii.474-479]
This moment feels like a direct corollary to the graveyard scene in Hamlet, when he wonders:
How long will a man lie ‘i th’ earth ere he rot?
[V.i.168]
Sea change. Duh. I didn’t realize that’s where the phrase came from. It’s about death.
The offering–the sign, the message–was telling me that something precious would come of the pieces of my dead father. Of my heartache. My grief. The black hole that I’m chipmunking around and reluctant to fall back into.
I guess it’s no surprise that both of these former English teachers would tell Senior Girls about books that made a difference to them.
The other women mentioned C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, the cd of which has been sitting on my desk for well over a year since my mother gave it to me.
Just think of all the things our mothers give us that rest patiently in a stack on our desk, or bedside table, until we need them.
#thetempest #teachinghamlet #agriefobserved #seachange #writinggrief #grief