remembering marilee

Rewind a few years, back to when I got hired to teach 5th grade at Highland West Elementary School. I was still relatively a newbie, only had a year and a half under my belt. Shortly after being hired there, I met Marilee. She had been teaching for a long time and she was great at it. She could do it all with her eyes closed. She was funny. She was smart. She was witty. And boy, was she was obnoxious.

She warned me about a depressed student with a difficult home life. She said, "Don't be surprised if he starts banging his head on his desk." This was at lunch in the teacher's lounge on the first day of school. I swear to you, not 15 minutes after we got back into the classroom, the boy crawled under his desk and started banging his head up and down. Because of her warning, I didn't freak out half as much as I would've on any other given day.

She used to say, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree" anytime a kid would do something just as bizarre as his parents. And she'd know, because she taught most of their parents. You always knew when it was going to come out of her mouth. She always had a knack of nailing that one just at the right time. Oh, we used to laugh about that.

Once we were doing recess duty together and a student asked her if she'd jump rope with them. She said, "If I jumped rope, I'd pee my pants." We must've laughed about that for a good 15 minutes. And I think she peed her pants anyway.

She had an earring collection that was out of this world. They all dangled and the more sparkly they were, the better. My favorites were her Christmas light bulbs.

Forgive my language, but it really isn't mine. It's Marilee's, and this is part of her story. Anytime something would get on her nerves, or she'd be mad about something going on at school, she'd always say, "Well, I don't give a rat's ass." It was just like her saying the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. You always knew when it was coming.

My first year there, Marilee had problems with her legs. They would swell up all the time and she was often in pain. She went to lots and lots of doctors, but it took them a long time to figure out what was going on.

I was deeply saddened to find out she had cancer. I can't remember the kind, but it was definitely in her lymph nodes. She underwent chemotherapy. She lost her hair. There were times she didn't know how she was going to get to her treatments, so once, I took a personal day so I could take her. She brought her paper bag in case she needed to throw up in the car on the way home.

She came back to teach for just a little while my second year there, before she got too sick to leave home. She cross-stitched all of us an ornament that year. And every time I put it on the tree, I get a little emotional.

I don't have any pictures of her and I, just the little ones in the yearbook. But thanks to her son, all the teachers got to pick a pair of her earrings. I chose one of her more mild pairs. And I have this ornament. When I look at it, I like to think that she had hope that her peace was going to come. And it did, the following spring.

I didn't get to know her for very long, but I miss her terribly.