A Hand Across Generations

“Hey Cogg,” called a student. He didn’t realize it, but he was taking the Independent’s teacher-by-day, waitress-by-night diarist by the hand on a trip through time. That hand crossed back when a student discovered her mother has cancer.

Monday, Sept. 26, 2005

My kids have called me every name in the book. They mess with my name, too. I’ve gotten ​“Miss,” ​“Mrs. Coggio,” ​“Miss Gina,” ​“Miss Kujo,” ​“Miss Coolio,” ​“What Up G,” ​“Coggie-Baby” (said in a snooty, clamped-jaw, Hamptons-esque accent) and today, ​“Cogg.”
​“Hey Cogg,” called one of my students from across the room. It was Dylan, a sophomore for the second time. He needed me to check his homework that he had completed in class to try to get credit.
On my way over, I smiled because ​“Cogg” is what my father’s students used to call him. My dad was a guidance counselor and a teacher forever. When he died in 1993 (I was 14 years old), over 500 people attended his memorial service. Many of them were his former students.
Cogg worked with the kids who were borderline failing, who had troubled homes and who were seen as the ​“bad” kids. I can’t tell you how many times since my father’s death my mother, siblings, and I have been approached by kids (now grown men and women with high school students of their own) whom my father helped. They gush with emotion and appreciation for my father’s caring. Many say they would be nowhere had it not been for my father.
So when my student called me ​“Cogg,” I was reunited across time and space with my father. Dylan asked if he could read his work to me because he didn’t want to share it with the rest of the class, as all the other students had done. He had turned a monologue into a poem, and he wanted only me to hear it. As I placed my hand on Dylan’s shoulder to lean over him as he read me his words, I imagined my father there, with his broad, thick hand on my shoulder, assuring me I was on the right path.

Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005

Today my lesson plan for my students was this: create an identity chart for the narrator or the narrator’s neighborhood in The House on Mango Street.
But I was the student and I learned this instead: my students’ personal struggles will remind me of the wounds I thought I had healed.
At 7:25 this morning, one of my students told me her mother has cancer and that the doctors had said it is progressing to a more serious stage. At first, my student Brinn didn’t want to talk about it. She hesitated sharing the information, claiming she’d go sit in another teacher’s room, or that she’d talk to me later. But as she walked out the door, she suddenly decided to stick around. She walked over to my desk; her voice cracked and tears rolled down her cheeks.
And that’s when I found out about the cancer.
And that’s also when I threw myself 12 years back in time and saw a young Gina sitting in front of myself, dealing with the struggles of a dying father.
That was not the place I thought I’d be at 7:25 this morning.

I heard Brinn say the exact same things I’d said 12 years ago: I heard her say she didn’t want to be anywhere near her home. I heard her say she wanted to spend time with her mother. I heard her say she didn’t want to spend time with her mother. I heard her say she didn’t want to know what struggles her mom is going through. I heard her say she wanted to know more. I heard her say that her mom was supposed to be strong for her. I heard her say she needed to be strong for her mom. And what about her brother who is in jail? And what about her two little brothers who live with her?

I remembered, so vividly, the conversation at the dinner table when I was in fifth grade, the night my parents told me my father was sick. I was eating spaghetti and meatballs. I didn’t know how to look at my parents in their eyes when they said, ​“Daddy has cancer.” I didn’t know what their words meant. I didn’t know what would happen next. And I spent three years not knowing what would happen next. I remember wanting to get up from the table, wanting to leave them while they sat in front of their dinners. I remember wanting nothing to do with them. Being away from them meant being away from the unknown.

Brinn tells me her mom sat down with her last night to tell her the details about the cancer and the doctors’ prognosis. Brinn says she listened to what her mom had to say and told her mom she’d go up to her room and be right back. But, Brinn says, she didn’t come back. She didn’t come down from her room all night. And as I’m staring at Brinn this morning, I’m seeing myself as a 12 year-old, reliving that feeling of needing to be alone and to leave my parents alone and to leave it all alone.

By now, both Brinn and I are crying. I’m trying to comfort her, I’m trying to offer level-headed advice, maybe some clarity, maybe some calm. But the more I talk, the more I realize what I’m trying to do is get rid of my own guilt through Brinn’s struggles. I’m trying to get a second chance at saying goodbye — ​“the right way. I’m trying to do it over again, for the two more months I would get back if I could, for the 20 minutes I would get back if I could. For the last moment I would get back if I could.

This whole time, for the year or so I’ve been teaching, I thought I had my shit together. I thought the past was in the past. I thought the reason I was here was to help my students. But maybe I’ve been kidding myself. Maybe I don’t have my shit together and maybe the reason I’m here is to get a second chance. I’m not equipped to be Brinn’s counselor. Her pain is too close to the kind I thought I’d dealt with. I’ll cry with her; I’ll be her shoulder and her rock. But I cannot fix her. And I cannot use her pain to fix my past.