Three events in junior high changed me forever. Each rocked my certainty in life’s stability and how quickly everything can change. The initial two, my first semester, portended how my life would spiral. The third occurred two years later during my last year in junior high. The first two sent my life off on an unforeseen path. The third one was larger and changed our country forever.
The first occurred on November 20th, the Monday before Thanksgiving on a day so bleak with pouring rain, it was as though the Universe had set the scene for the day’s events. My father died. No warning. No chance to say goodbye. Stopped with no lingering words of love left to hang my heart on. Instead, I held onto the argument we had the night before he died. And the anger he expressed about my brother the next morning before he went outside. That’s where, moments later, his heart exploded with a force so strong he ripped the gold necklace off his neck as he plunged to the ground.
I could write everything visually and with scenes, but I’ve done that. And done that. And done that. There’s an entire chapter in my memoir, The Space Between: A Memoir of Mother-Daughter Love at the End of Life. There’s also an earlier post here on Substack filled with details written on the 60th anniversary of my father’s death.
There are only so many times I’m willing to go back to hell and write in depth about what I saw, felt, tasted, said, and heard.
Same for this scene, which was also in that earlier post:
Two weeks after my dad died, while in the quad during our morning break, my “girlfriends,” en masse came up to me, and Sandi, their leader, said they no longer wanted to be friends with me because I was too depressed. They turned their backs on me and walked away, leaving me standing alone surrounded by hundreds of teenagers who I imagined witnessed my humiliation.
I disappeared after those days, down a dark hole where I did my best to be invisible. But I was tall and hard to overlook. I wished my brother couldn’t see me because often, when he did, he hurt me. I didn’t want teachers to see me because they had turned mean. Mean, as though I was bad because my dad died. I felt like Hester Prynne, except instead of the scarlet letter A for Adultery, I was branded with a black D for Death written across every blouse or sweater I wore.
Decades later, after I founded a center for grieving children, I was shocked to witness that most teachers still held the same negative attitude towards grieving children and teens. They labeled those kids bad or ADHD. They labeled them defective and treated them harshly, never giving them a pass for the deep wounds they carried.
One teacher even had the audacity to tell a 13-year-old girl whose brother had been murdered, “Well, that’s okay, because your brother was a bad kid.”
The third life-changing day rocked our country and the world when we all learned that someone shot and killed our young president. Assassinated. Our president was dead. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and his much younger wife Jacqueline had ushered in a new and vibrant era into our country.
Kennedy was president a brief two years and 306 days when Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed him. He was 46 and our First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, a young 34. After our principal announced his death over the PA system, all classes were let out for an unscheduled recess. Students gathered in the quad, wandering around in a daze. What I noticed most was the anguish of black girls, their shaking heads between their hands, wailing, “Who will care about us now?”
We saw a somber Jackie, still wearing her pink suit, stained with Jack’s blood. She stood next to Lyndon Baines Johnson on the airplane back to Washington while he was being sworn in as our next president. She had refused to change her clothes, blooded with her husband’s brain, because she wanted them to see what they’d done to Jack.
I didn’t realize she was also grieving the recent death of her two-day-old infant son, Patrick, who’d died only three months before.
For days, everything stopped. TV channels limited their programming, and the only thing to watch was reports on the assassination. Watching TV two days later, I saw Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald, the man presumed to have killed our president. Oswald's swollen and bruised face made it obvious he’d been beaten after his capture. For days, the main conversation was, “Did you see Ruby shoot Oswald live or did you only watch the rerun?”
And then came the funeral watched around the world. Jacqueline Kennedy, now our former First Lady, dressed all in black, her face hidden behind an extensive black veil, along with John’s two brothers, Edward “Teddy” and Bobby Kennedy followed behind the riderless black horse and caisson carrying the president’s casket.
A riderless horse represents a "fallen warrior" or a leader who will lead no more. 16-year-old Black Jack was selected for this honor. He carried a pair of polished, spurred boots placed backward in the saddle's stirrups, and a sword. Coincidentally, Jackie’s deceased father, John Bouvier, was nicknamed Black Jack.
The pain of grief etched on their faces, Jackie and Bobby held hands. We were told Jackie directed the funeral plans and modeled them after Abe Lincoln’s memorial service.
We shattered more, watching two-year-old John Kennedy Jr., dubbed Jon-Jon by the press, as he saluted when his father’s casket passed by. It was his third birthday. We watched that little boy grow into a gorgeous man, and again cried decades later when the plane he was flying crashed, ending his young life much too soon.
Everyone talked about Jackie’s remarkable stoicism. Years later, I watched the funeral replayed on TV and saw sobs shaking her body. Behind the veil, she was a young woman, shocked and grieving the murder of her husband.
Our country would never be the same.
For me, John Kennedy’s death, and knowing his children, Caroline and John no longer had their father, reached deep inside me because only two years and two days before, I had lost my dad. I couldn’t know what they felt, but I experienced a profound connection because, like me, they’d have to live the rest of their lives without their daddy.
President John Kennedy’s death wasn’t the only assassination that rocked our country in the 1960s. I was older and out of high school when they killed Martin Luther King Jr. and Jack’s younger brother, Bobby. Once again, without warning, our country’s trajectory changed.
I was also changed because of these important events. I could have written about other world events or days in my life, but chose the most significant ones to share. I changed, but not for the better. I lost my innocence and trust in kindness and a world that made sense.
I wouldn’t go back to junior high for a billion dollars. I’ve written about those years in depth, but not today. There’s only so many times one can will themselves back to hell with all its emotions.
And that’s fine.
I’ve heard it said that to feel is to heal. But that’s not always true. Sometimes to feel is to hurt again.
I’m 74 and I’ve hurt enough.
Now it’s your turn: What was Junior High like for you? Did any personal, national, or international events change you? If so, in what ways?
I look forward to hearing from you and reading your stories.
We learn from each other.
This was really good Very well written history with great photos. I forgot Jackie was 34 and had just recently lost Patrick. Plus Jon Jon's 3rd birthday!!
Thank you for sharing and sorry about your struggles in school especially after your loss of your father
Leslie
It was high school, my junior year in our history class when we got the word.
Everyone was stunned. It felt like a family member was taken from us.
There was no formal class dismissal, everyone just walked out to grieve on their own terms. I will never forget that day.