I ran into Gary Dessinger today. We had lunch at Bon Secours Hospital, were I work. Gary is a Chemistry teacher at Finney High School. He was my chemistry teacher when I went there. He was one of my mentors and recipient of the DO-IT! Board.
The DO-IT! Board was a piece of cardboard that Mike Sivak, my locker partner, and I had mounted to the inside door of our locker. On this board we had written anything that came to mind. It was a recording of the thoughts and feelings of two seventeen year old kids. For instance it had insightful prose like:
'Cindy S Chews Gum Like A Cow!'
It was the graffiti of our minds. It was the angst of being seventeen and not knowing what life had to offer. It was the statement of our commitment to live life to its fullest. We kept it under lock and key behind the safety of our locker door. Like most good secrets, however, there were security leaks. There were break-in attempts to find out what secrets were recorded on the DO-IT! Board.
One morning while exchanging books between classes, a pair of hands grabbed the locker door from the outside. With my lightning fast reflexes I dropped my books and grabbed my side of the door. It was Dessinger. He wanted the DO-IT! Board. We battled back and forth. When he tried to reach around to grab the prize, I could pull the door my way, in the process threatening his fingers with extreme pain and perhaps limiting his ability to hold chalk. We were at an impasse until Sivak came to the rescue.
He gave one final push my way, closing the locker door, thereby keeping the DO-IT! Board a secret. We had one-upped our mentor. The Christmas after graduation, Sivak and I paid him a visit and presented the DO-IT! Board to him as a Christmas present. This little gray-haired man who sat before me at lunch, who was at the hospital to visit another teacher, Victoria Johnides.
Victoria Johnides was a science teacher. She was a big, strong Greek woman who held after-school classes for students like me who seemed to ask too many questions. We were always questioning why things were the way they were and she seemed to enjoy providing explanations from the scientific point of view.
Here she was… dying of cancer.
We did not cover that subject in class. At the time it did not seen pertinent to ask those kinds of questions.
'Mrs. Johnides, in 1994, when you are dying of cancer will any of these
experiments seem as spectacular or wondrous as they do now? When our paths cross
again in 28 years, what words should I say to you that will have meaning?'
These are the things that we do not ask of people. Oh we say things inspired by a certain bravado like, 'If I ever get like that, shoot me, just shoot me.' However when push comes to shove, do we really mean it? Do we really want to die?
It comes back to a very basic question, 'If I do not wish to die, then why am I here?'
Why am I HERE? I don't understand why I am where I am. I say this because I have been blessed with having had many good teachers, friends and mentors they were. I have met many good people who have touched my life so deeply only to see them pass away.
They come here to Bon Secours Hospital and too often I am witness to their final days. And never, ever is there the least echo of the wisdom that came from their lips or the guidance that they provided except the memories that are replayed so quickly through my mind as they pass.
I suppose that this is the real crux of my frustration. Has my life been manipulated so that I am here, now, for them? Am I the documenter of their deeds?
I don't understand why I am here.
In July of 1992, Ernie Stengel was admitted here. I remember this distinctly because I was sitting at my desk working on a 'very important problem' when the phone rang.
It was Ernie.
'George, I'm in room 302. I'm afraid I'm not doing too well. My kidney's aren't working.'
He sounded weak and tired. I ran up the stairs from the basement. As I walked into room 302, I noticed how Ernie had gained weight. He looked puffy. I also noticed how he had 'that' color. It was the pale gray of cancer. I no longer had a very important problem to deal with.
'They've got me in here for tests, George. In February I started to have a lot of lower Back pain. So he sent me to Physical Therapy and that didn't do a God damn thing. Then he sent me to a Chiropractor. It's not good. He wouldn't listen to me. I kept telling him how shitty I was feeling. Then I couldn't piss. So I went back to him again. God damn it!
It's not good.'
He grins now.
'And you know the worst thing about it is, I haven't wanted to get laid lately. You know there's a problem when Stengel loses his interest in broads.'
We laughed. It was one of the few times over the next six weeks that we laughed. There was a week of tests. There was the surgery to remove the tumor that was blocking his ureters. Then there was the chemo. Throughout it all, the man who had taught my Great Books class in the 12th grade; who helped me to grab life, to appreciate the serendipity of it all, weakened slowly and died.
We had the chance to reminisce. He used to call me on Saturday mornings to say that he would stop by with some other students and we were going to go off on some adventure. The other students were always girls. The adventure was always some stream of consciousness type of thing. Maybe we would venture off to Toledo to the art museum, or to the DIA, or go go-cart racing. Once he got a hold of me at Wayne State when I was a student there, we went putt-putt golfing. It was all very innocent.
He was in love with one of the girls. Now 24 years later he asked me if I ever ran into her. As we talked about her he began to cry and I realized that now, so close to death, he still loved her. For him, at that moment, it was a pain worse then cancer.
During his last few weeks he became more listless, and weaker. For a day or two before he started to seizure, he would only answer me in monosyllabic phrases. We were like two misplaced characters out of a Tolstoy novel, he was Ivan Ilyich and I was his Gerasim; covering him up, encouraging him to eat, and making sure that he did his breathing exercises.
I was stunned upon entering his room one day. His side rails on his bed were padded, he was restrained with a vest Posey... and seizuring. Ernie was struggling with the life force itself as it slowly left his body. He wouldn't let go. I began to sob. Here was the man who read my autobiography to the entire Great Books class because it somehow, naively, touched him.
At the time we were reading 'Look Homeward, Angel' by Thomas Wolfe.
'You're Eugene (the main character), George. Damn it, you're one honest son of a bitch.'
He was impressed, I was mortified. Because up to this point I saw him as a menacing, unapproachable Red Devil.
As all of this was going through my mind, I began to sob uncontrollably. His death was imminent.
The sun was setting over the roof of the building and was sending a solid shaft of light into Ernie's room. I struggled to push his bed over to the window so he could see the sun set one last time.
'Look at the sun Ernie. Look at the sun,' I said.
The tears were streaming down my face. Finally the bed was up against the window. Sunlight bathed his body and reduced his pupils to tiny black dots.
Ernie's oncologist came in, all tanned and healthy looking. He could see I was upset and began to make references to how he was making Ernie as comfortable as possible. He said he had to be careful because of the Kevorkian publicity. I was immediately unimpressed with this guy, in fact I disliked him the more he spoke. Then as an act of consolation he said that this type of death didn't have to happen.
'How old are you?' 'You know in a couple of years you should start getting rectal exams.'
I felt like I had just received one. This was the guy who sent Ernie to physical therapy. I was so angry.
I started to laugh.
The absurdity of this man and his effect on Ernie's life hit me like a baseball bat. If I didn't laugh I think I would have hit the man with his absurdity.
Ernie died two days later.
Witnessing death has never really bothered me. It really hasn't. By the time we are at that point, all we are left with is our humanity. All the rest is window dressing. In a hospital, you usually don’t get to know the person that lay before you very well, and the window dressing has all been stripped away.
I am disturbed when I am touched so deeply by someone only to have them go. I am disturbed and overwhelmed by a reverent sort of wonder at how life can be so vital and fragile and powerful and absurd and persistent and brief… all at once.
So now the cycle repeats itself. Victoria Johnides is lying in her bed. She has been in and out of isolation. Her condition gradually worsens but has periods of relative comfort and occasionally even gets a little rest.
When I had the opportunity, I told her nurses at lunch about the person, that the patient in 221B was a science teacher who once taught with passion and dignity, who took the school on ski trips, and who once broke up a fight between Henry Lopez and me in the 9th grade.
--The End --
4 comments:
God.
Because I am working on a "This I Believe" commentary for NPR radio that mentions Ernie, just on a hunch I decided to do a google search for Ernie and I found your post about Ernie's death, George.
I am devestated. I am touched. I am angry at myself that I found out so long after the fact that Ernie has left us.
I am laughing at your description of Ernie's profanity, his sexual energy, and his absolutely satanic humor, even in the face of his own death. Yes, that's the Ernie I remember.
I feel guilty that I wasn't there with him when he got sick, when he died. I was in upstate New York, putzing around in Ithaca, in grad school. He was on my mind a lot in the early 90's, in fact, but I never fucking picked up a phone and tried to call him.
I graduated from Finney High in 1979, George. I was a poet and a writer, and Ernie helped me, a poor young Black kid, to gain the confidence to write, to compete in academic and writing competitions, and helped me to get a scholarship to Wayne State. All the successes of my life are due to Ernie, and to the other teachers who illuminated my life when I was young.
None though, was quite as illuminating as Ernie. You know good and damn well what I mean, don't you, George? "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliott, Sainger's "Catcher in the Rye," "The Sculptor's Funeral," by Willa Cather, and Robert Hayden's sensitive, devestatingly poignant and sad, "Those Winter Sundays," which I was just teaching to my own students just last week.
Ernie was my teacher for Honors English, and for Journalism at Finney Sr. High in Detroit, at the edge of Grosse Pointe. I don't know for sure what years you had him as a teacher, George, but when I knew him he was lanky (the German meaning of his name, actually), corduroy pants wearing, with a button up shirt and turtleneck underneath.
He always had a cup of cofee that he cluched in class like the life's blood that I now see my own coffee as being when I teach.
And good Lord in heaven and Satan in hell, the man was profane. A loud, cackling, comic, hilarious, wonderfully alive stream of baaaaad words would erupt from him in the middle of some silence while we were reading or writing in class, and BAM! He was off on some lascivious, profound, amazing rant, that would light my soul on fire and make me want to run home and read EVERYTHING I COULD GET MY HANDS ON.
And I did. My love of books predated my meetin Ernie, but my obsession with them was Ernie's sweet and wonderful gift to me.
Not just Ernie, of course. Also Mrs. Scott, who gave me a love of film in her film studies class, Mr. and Mrs, Ramsey, English teachers and husband and wife at Finney, Crazy, brilliant Mr. Fortuna, who taught me Government (I still repeat his lessons to my own students when I get into a tear and get angry about how ittle my Black students appreciate the wonderful and revolutionary beauty of our system of government), and Frank Fortuna used to actually walk CONSTITUTIONALS around the school building at lunch time, as if he were a quaint Italian gentlemen, a character in a Bronte sisters novel. There was Ms. Douglas, who taught me poetry, life, and imagination, and the quirky, sensitive, and intellectually overwhelming, character right out of a 1950's film and horn rim glasses wearing, 'Mr Wizard' looking Mr. Fennel. Mr. Fennel was my science teacher at Finney who helped me to LOVE science. And then there is the lovely, stylish, ascot eraring, sarcastic Dr. Leo Cerpial, who was physically challenged, but he was chair of the English depatemnt, and he was in no way at all spiritually or emotionally challenged. He was not challenged in the love he was willing to give to me.
But Ernie.
Ernie was the most luminous of them all in those years, and he is most luminous in my memories now, and I am so glad I got to read your testimony to his enduring courage, George. He was the brave Ernie I knew, even in the end, and I'm sure he's still Brave Ernie Stengel even now, wherever he is. And where ever he is he's standing on top of his desk shouting 'alarums' in the style of shakespeare, and denouncing all forms of dishonesty, and of course chasing women still, and when he catches them, he loves them with all his heart.
I am in your debt.
-Rayfield A. Waller
Department of Africana Studies
Wayne State University
raylena_2000@yahoo.com
Like Rayfield, I have been searching for more information about Mr. Stengel. I am also a writer, and I have the added bonus of being a teacher. Mr. Stengel (I cannot bear to refer to him by his first name as that would feel impertinent) saved me from suicide. I never had an opportunity to properly thank him. He saved me from an early death and inspired me to become a writer and teacher. More importantly, he taught me to view the written word as a powerful tool for healing.
Mr. Stengel was my English teacher in 1985. Finney was not the creative, ideas-driven place of the 1970's. By the mid-80's, it was drowning in urban blight and apathy. Save for my best friend Abdul, I was the only student not talking smack, sitting on the desks, or listening to music. I desperately wanted to learn. Mr. Stengel and my love for literature propelled me through that year. Every morning, I wanted to die, but Mr. Stengel's special attention gave me hope. Though he never asked the particulars, he knew I was a kid in pain and he care for me through literature.
I was living with my mother, her pedophile husband and my three siblings. My step-father's sexual assaults left me an empty shell. I was the kid no one noticed. I'd been thrown out of Renaissance High School due to hospitalizations for suicide before that year, and I felt inferior. So there I was, stuck in violent, crazy Finney. Imagine walking through metal detectors into a hellish prison-like structure full of mean-spirited, aggressive kids. A sensitive kid like me didn't have a chance. Mr. Stengel saved me from that place.
He did the most unusual thing, probably something he should not have done: He sent me to his office every class period and gave me special assignments. He'd order me to read Vonnegut, Sartre, Beckett, Kafka and Cervantes, and then say, "Now, emulate them." Emulate them! I know, how presumptuous, but also, how innovative! I wrote tens of short stories in his office. That year, I made a firm decision to become a writer. He'd read my work with appreciation and make the most gentle of suggestions. Believe me, I worked hard.
I miss him.
Thanks for your post, George. It meant a great deal to me.
-Britt Verstegen
I was touched and yet disturbed by your blog as I also felt a connection to this eccentric, slightly unhinged teacher. He helped us survive in a nonfunctional environment where there were no rules or boundaries (Finney 1982-1985).
Your blog itself is presents a problem, since it violates HIPAA laws and though well intentioned, you are at risk of losing your hospital job or worse, federal criminal charges for revealing diagnosis and details of hospital stay. As a nurse, this makes me extremely uncomfortable since I have to safeguard patient confidentiality and privacy on a daily basis. Also, I would have considered it a privilege to share those last moments with him but also have enough respect not to share the details. As I recall, Mr Stengel had a son. Perhaps he would not appreciate some of the details revealed in this blog. Though Mr Stengel probably freely revealed this info to you, it should still be regarded as private. I appreciate your admiration for this wonderful person, but in future, please remember that what happens in the hospital, stays in the hospital. ---Concerned
about an hour ago
Bubbles... You are over zealous in your defense of HIPAA... and I do appreciate your concern. I know that there is a human being in there somewhere, let her out. That is what Mr Stengel taught us.
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
What happens in the classroom, must be practiced with mindfulness, love and compassion every day of our lives.
Post a Comment