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Sherry came to me through the Laubach Literacy Lab. It was the late 1980’s and I’d gotten the grand idea that I’d like to tutor adult non-readers, so I’d devoted one weekend to learning the Laubach method. My first student was a middle-aged man who drove a truck for a local plumbing business. After working with him for a month or two and inviting him to the comfort of my kitchen table, I discovered that his brother is incarcerated at the Idaho Correctional Facility for 1st degree murder. He was a respectful and motivated student, and he tried hard, but life got in the way. He worked too many long hours and had too many problems at home to be able to study. He wore coke-bottle glasses and I always wondered what he was really thinking as he sounded out the words to stories about old west gangsta’s like Wild Bill Hickok. I was relieved when he announced that he simply wouldn’t be able to come any more.
Several months later a woman from Laubach called. She had a student who was desperate for a teacher and she was sure I’d be perfect. I was not so sure. My plate was heaped over the edges already. The lady was persistent and informed me that the very best volunteers are always the most busy volunteers—the ones who claimed they absolutely had no time left to squeeze in another responsibility. I sighed. The only way I’d be able to get my ear off the phone was to consent to working with this new student.
A few days later, Sherry called and we agreed to meet at the Copper Kitchen by the airport. I looked up to see a slip of a girl approaching my table. Our eyes met and I smiled and stood up to greet her.
“Are you Sherry?”
“Yes.”
“Hi, Sherry, its nice to meet you. I’m Linda.”
We chatted for a while, exploring each other’s soul like a couple on a blind date. Sherry was soft-spoken but energetic and enthusiastic. Her blue eyes sparkled and fearlessly held my gaze. She described her early education as a series of interruptions and missed opportunities—new schools and unstable parents. She had managed to graduate from high school, mostly due to the “kindness” of teachers who recognized how hard she was trying and provided her with extra credit and “breaks.” I thought to myself: an education killed with kindness.
Her goal, she stated with conviction, was to go to college. She wasn’t sure what she would major in, but she wanted desperately to have a diploma. She was already on probation at BSU and knew she needed to do something different. Her partner, a sophomore art major, had tried to help her but Sherry admitted that this was stressful to their relationship. She handed me a folded square of lined notebook paper. “I figured you’d need to get a feel for where I am, so I wrote a bit about my life.”
I started to unfold the sheet, but she suggested I read it later. We agreed to meet again the following week. She smiled disarmingly as she got up to leave. “See you next week,” she said over her shoulder.
I sat there with my cold coffee and read her penciled bio. Her handwriting was lovely and even. Her word choice was conversational and eloquent despite misspellings one might expect from a third-grader. The first word of her essay was capitalized. There was a period after the last word on the back side of the page. In between was a vast ocean without landmarks, describing a childhood marked by the divorce of her parents, their remarriage, and then another separation. It appeared that Sherry was her father’s little helper—his little girl and stand-in for a son. She shared his love of motorcycles, cars, camping, and hunting. He, in turn, relied on her to help him whenever he needed a second pair of hands. He’d thought nothing of hauling her out of school two months before summer break. Often, in the fall she started school after her dad limited out his hunting tags—several weeks into the new semester.
The hairs on my arms prickled as I read her frank account of a failed attempt at college and the failure of her first lesbian romance, followed by an attempted suicide, and then hospitalization and months of recuperation from the bullet wound to her stomach. The story seemed too fantastic to be true, but I sensed a deep sincerity behind her frankness and lack of self pity. I forgot about how busy I was and threw myself into lesson plans and strategies.
The Laubach board member who’d called me was convinced that Sherry was dyslexic. At that time, dyslexia was the convenient whipping boy for most non-reading adults. I knew a little about the disability, but not much. The Laubach method of repetition, picture association, and a ladder of success, boasted a high achievement rate among adult dyslexic learners. I went to the library to research dyslexia and prepared our first lesson based upon the dyslexia assumption.
Beginning with the basics, I discovered that Sherry had no problem with the alphabet. She recognized all of the letters and their associated sounds. Reading a list of one and two syllable words was no problem for her. I began to question the diagnosis. She rarely swapped d’s for b’s, 6’s for 9’s, p’s for q’s. She was quite adept at phonetically sounding out words.
The more we worked together, the more I began to imagine a pattern: Little Sherry comes to a new school two weeks after the session began. All the kids stare curiously. They’ve completed summer review sessions and moved on to new material. But Sherry didn’t even finish the last month of school the previous spring. As the kids read aloud from their Dick and Jane books, little Sherry panics. She counts ahead to see which paragraph will be hers. She starts sounding the words silently— but all of a sudden the spotlight is there! Its her turn to read aloud in front of these strange kids. She’s embarrassed to read slowly so she rushes, skipping the little words and clutching the big words like lifeboats scattered across the paragraph. She gets enough of those big words correct to appease the teacher who moves on, leaving the little girl stewing in the stale adrenaline of stage fright. What did she comprehend from this story? Nothing. She “read” her paragraph out of context because she couldn’t afford to follow her predecessors as they sounded out the words to the paragraphs before hers. She missed all the crucial linkages in her own paragraph, and besides, she was so embarrassed about being in the spotlight that she wouldn’t have captured the meaning of the words anyway. The rest of the story following her performance is overshadowed by the thudding of her heart as it slowly regains equilibrium.
Sherry raced through passages that she read to me. Then she’d look up in confusion afterwards, unsure of what it was she’d just said. In her haste she had no concept of the pacing, the road signs of punctuation that help us decipher meaning. We worked on sentence structure, punctuation, and reading slowly in a conversational voice. I typed up the rules we talked about, along with examples, and presented her with these laminated pages for quick reference. Sherry never missed a session and our hour long lessons often stretched beyond two hours because she was so tenacious, so focused on getting it right.
But alas, Sherry’s life kept getting in the way of her studies. Each week, she’d arrive unprepared, homework untouched. She worked like a demon while we were together, but during the week her job, her father, her mother, or her relationship derailed her best intentions. Our progress was geologically slow for about a year and a half. Meanwhile her partner, Josie, was getting B’s in her coursework at BSU. Sherry was impatient and determined to enroll in the next semester.
I advised that she simply had to get a handle on her life. “Sherry, if you can’t even find two hours a week to practice for our sessions, how in the world will you manage to find three hours for every credit hour you sign up for? Do you realize that just to get through that entry level English class, you will be expected to spend nine hours a week in addition to the three hours you’ll be spending in class?”
She hung her head. “I’ll do better this week. Please believe me. I know I can do this.”
“I know you can do the work, Sherry. What I don’t know, is if you can manage your time. That’s what’s holding you back. That really has been holding you back since you began first grade. You are bright, capable, and work very hard. But academics require practice, time, and discipline.”
“I know what you’re saying. I’ll make it happen this week. I know I will,” she vowed.
But the next week she trudged up to our table and slumped onto the bench. Again, her father had derailed her study plans. He was fixing her jeep and needed her help. She needed the jeep to get to work and to come to our sessions. How could she refuse to help her dad when he was helping her?
I sighed. There was no arguing the point. “We’ll just have to practice here and now—again,” I said, disappointed. “But Sherry, once you start school, I am not going to donate my time just to insure that you have two hours of study time per week.”
She’d already enrolled at BSU, against my advice. I knew she wasn’t ready for college level work. And she and Josie were having problems. I could see another failure on her horizon and it made me sad. But on our last session before classes began that fall, I wished her luck. “You won’t have time for these sessions with me, even though we both enjoy this time together. You’ll have to put ever spare moment you can scrape together into studying.”
She agreed. We hugged long and hard. Her eyes were moist. “If you’re stumped, if you’ve got a writing project, I’ll be happy to meet with you to fine tune it before you turn it in. But you have to have it written before I’ll agree to meet with you,” I warned. She nodded and thanked me.
I didn’t hear from Sherry for several months, though I often thought of her. Then one morning, my heart hit the floor. Her name was on the obituary page. She was 27 years old and dead. I knew before Josie verified it. She’d taken more careful aim this time.
Snoring Dog Studio said:
Oh, what a sad tale – what a lost life. What more could anyone have done? Was she doomed? Could anything have turned it around for her? You’ll never know. But you tried. This is going on in our country more and more all around us. People are giving up hope. I pray that we can all get on the right, humane path and soon. Thank you for sharing this, Linda.
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rangewriter said:
Yes, the questions rattle around like so many marbles in an otherwise empty pocket. But I don’t have the answers to any of them. I don’t think anyone has answers to questions like this. Sherry seemed so strong, so positive. It was hard to imagine her dealing with the dark fog of depression, but obviously she did. She was infinitley sweet, despite her tomboy shell. At Christmas she presented me with a cassette tape of her favorite music from the soundtrack of Boys on the Side. To this day, I love that music and think of her when I hear it.
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Val said:
The chances are that her father or another person close to her pushed her to the edge with too many demands on her time. I remember a teenage boy I was helping with art years ago when I was a volunteer at a centre for juvenile delinquents (and I wasn’t much older myself at the time). His arwork was fantastic – very good, he could have been a draughtsman or an architect and could have earned himself a very decent wage with those skills and some training. I told him he should go to art school and he was very enthusiastic about it but then his father told him he couldn’t because he thought that art was just playing around really. He was very much younger than Sherry (just 14) but with an overbearing family… that sort of thing happens and continues to happen.
By the way – apropos Dyslexia. I have a bit of it plus the ‘numerical’ version of it, called Dyscalculia and I did a course some years ago (by correspondence) to help myself overcome it. I learnt that the major thing I needed to do was to slow down. I’m rather better now, though still have it. And I understand what you defined about Sherry’s reasons for being unable to learn – particularly losing the context in things because of fear of others judging one. I had a lot of illness as a child and teen which interrupted my schooling and it did make me very reticent to do things the way others managed.
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rangewriter said:
It is interesting that you have dealt with dyslexia and mostly overcome it. I understand that adults can often learn ways of dealing with dyslexia, but it must cause terrible confusion to a young child. We tend to classify people as smart or not by how quickly they catch on to new skills.When a youngster is slow to learn to read, that infamous “slow” label floats above the poor kid’s head. What horrible damage that must do to a child’s self actualization! But the really smart ones are those who are able to figure out a way around hidden disabilities…often without a roadmap, purely using their own imagination, creativity, and perserverance.
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souldipper said:
Oh, Rangewriter, this is heartbreaking. I take my hat off to you for hanging in all that time. You may have been the biggest supporter Sherry ever experienced in her life.
You wrote this piece so beautifully. It was easy to fall in love with Sherry because you presented her as this vulnerable little human who was a big bundle of enthusiasm.
I am so glad you had time for her. It was so important – for her and for you.
I love your heart.
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rangewriter said:
Souldipper, you make me sound like some sort of hero. I am not. I, like her parents, family,and “the system,” failed Sherry. But you are correct in saying that this was important for me. I have found that every time I push myself out of my own tiny comfort zone and reach out to others, I am rewarded tenfold.
Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment.
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Dia said:
First…a test to make sure this will take:
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Dia said:
Yes!! Okay. Now I feel like I can pour my heart out. 🙂
First, I love the way you write. I love the subjects you choose. I love the blend of mind and heart and honesty you put into what you write. I’d like to see this piece published somewhere Linda. You write about important things.
Where suicide is concerned, having spent a few different periods in my life hanging around the edge of that particular cliff, here’s something I learned that is kind of Darwinian and hard, but nonetheless true: If a person’s desire to live is essentially strong but temporarily flickering for some reason, then outside intervention can make all the difference in the world. That’s why we should always, always fight for anyone who’s teetering on the edge….because you just never know. But if a person’s desire to live is structurally weak or broken, then all the love, support, and intervention in the world will probably only be able to delay an early death.
I’ve experienced my fluctuating desire to live as literally like an emotional organ, like a heart or a liver or a lung. And just like a physical organ, it needs me to nourish it, strengthen it, shield it, and monitor it for any symptoms of weakening. I was born with a really strong love of life, but some brutal hits early on did damage and it took a lot of years of just barely surviving to develop enough scar tissue to finally climb back out of the danger zone. Now I track my thoughts and emotions regularly, like checking vital signs, for any sign that I might be slipping back into that longing to die again.
Also, for me, the depression involves feeling emotions like sadness, loss, futility, helplessness, shame etc. more frequently than a non-depressive usually does. It’s just part of the brain chemistry. And needless to say, those emotions can have a corrosive effect on my desire to live if I’m not careful. That’s why over the years, it’s been vitally important to develop my endurance levels and learn how to live with higher levels of heavy emotions than the average person has to. And I still have a good, nourishing, whole life. It’s like the butternut squashes I’ve got growing out on a trellis in the garden. As the squashes grow bigger and heavier, the area of the vine they’re hanging from gets thicker and thicker. It’s because of stress, but still, the overall effect is a stronger vine.
It sounds like Sherry was a sensitive soul with permeable boundaries. And lesbian in Idaho a couple of decades ago to boot. Talk about vulnerable. But her life was still in her hands. Not yours. Not her father’s. Not her girlfriend’s. There wasn’t anything you could have done to “fix” her problems Linda. Anymore than anyone out there could have “fixed” mine. You supported her and helped her try to develop tools that SHE wanted to develop, and expressed your faith in her by showing up again and again and again. Frankly, you probably helped buy her some extra time. But in the end her desire to live just wasn’t strong enough–for whatever reason–to overcome the odds stacked up against her and that’s just nature. Like being born with a weak heart. (Which then moves into a whole other discussion about length of life vs quality of life and I’m not going there!)
Anyway, that’s my loooong two cents worth. Sorry. Couldn’t help it. 🙂 Great post.
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Priya said:
Linda, when you think of Sherry, do you smile as well? Or is it just sorrow at a brilliant light quenched? Does it not make you happy, too, that you knew her?
When I finished reading this post, I felt a little enriched with the knowledge that there lived a girl with a fire to burn out the inessential. The fact that she eventually lost the battle does not make the intensity of her being any less memorable. So, thank you, for you’ve added another person to my very long list of memorable people. So deep is their effect that meeting them in person is not really necessary.
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rangewriter said:
Sherry joins Chaitanya and Vinay Mama. She’s in good company. I do think of Sherry with a smile. She was a dear. My life was enriched by knowing her and by the trust she had in me. But of course, my smile droops because her comet flashed by too quickly. And then I wonder how many other dear troubled souls are floating around, oh-so-near yet oh-so-far-away. Others whose lives are mixed up and complicated from birth to death. I hope these souls are able to squeeze a few minutes of untrammeled joy into their lives.
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dinkerson said:
My God.
I had noticed something you wrote in a comment, and it made me want to see what else you had to say.
Well… I’m glad I did.
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Cindy Salo said:
Linda,
I sent the link to this piece to a friend of mine who has mentioned wanting to tutor adults.She found this powerful and an example of what an uphill battle it must be.
Richard Shelton described 30 years teaching writing in Arizona prisons in Crossing the Yard – http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid1845.htm
Yes, it was an uphill battle. On the other hand, he mentored several published authors:
Ken Lamberton, who won the John Burroughs Medal – http://www.kenlamberton.com/
and poets:
Jimmy Santiago Baca – http://www.poemhunter.com/jimmy-santiago-baca/
On the 3rd hand, it took 30 years.
Cindy
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rangewriter said:
Cindy, I hope I didn’t leave readers feeling that working in adult literacy is grim or gruesome. I enjoyed every minute I spent with Sherry. Although Sherry’s demise was heartbreaking, it didn’t diminish the richness that working with her brought to my life. Even working with the would-be plumber was challenging and interesting. Adult non-readers are often brilliant…brilliant most of all for their ability to mask their deficiancy. The would-be plumber’s motivation to learn was to be able to help his kids with their homework. Despite his position in life, despite the criminal element that hovered so near, he was just like the rest of us. He wanted to provide something better for his kids. He was challenging to work with because his survival had depended upon a thick, bristly shell of defensiveness against a world that seems bent on walking over the top of people like him and his family. But I could tell that he appreciated my time. He particularly appreciated that I went out of my way to find books and stories that were interesting to him.
I’m no Richard Shelton, though. Sad to say..
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notesofanantique said:
Dinkerson recommends you highly. I see why. What a moving, emotional story. I can only imagine how this must have impacted you, as simply the reading impacted me.
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rangewriter said:
Thank you for visiting, Charles. Yes, many years have passed since all this happened, yet I still think of her often. I wonder what her life could have looked like today if only she could have surmounted all the troubles that weighed her down. But I know she is one of many whom we lose and we lose their gifts as well.
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