THERE ARE THOSE TEACHERS..e

There are those teachers, when your young and

obnoxious but they still fight hard to teach you 

not only the lessons that are listed on your 

report card but life lessons.

I have had a few.

Those that stay in your heart and mind long after

you are grown with your own family.

I speak today of one of those blessed Saints

who put up with my teenage shenanigans

and knew what I was up to even though I believe

I was pulling wool over her eyes.

Mrs. Janet Bowman.

Yes, this woman now, I hate to say

is suffering from one of the worst diseases

there can be:

Alzheimer's Disease.

It seems so unfair to have a woman who was

so so very smart to have this dreaded disease.

I bet she rolled her eyes and though

"Oh my!"

When after finally getting rid of me one year

in Biology to sees she had me again 

the next year for Chemistry.

I should have met with her before

her mind went too far, to share

with her what I did learn from her...

Now I am not sure she would know...

SO I write it here in hopes that her hubby,

Chris may read it to her and she will

at least smile...

I was the class clown. After having her the first

year I knew her, she me.

I knew if I could get her to veer from her lesson

plan, we could have a good class.

I knew if I got her talking of her young son,

Stephen, which she rarely did,

she kept family and work separate,

it would be a short class.

Yet something happened when she was veered

off that lesson plan and showed us who she

was at home. When she mentioned Stephen,

her eyes lit up, she swore at three years old

he was smarter than all of us and knew

that periodic table already.

I was a smart ass teen but I knew she liked

me, she saw past my obnoxious being 

to the woman I would become.

Sometimes she made me stay after class to talk

to me. Of course, I would be afraid I would

get in trouble. Yet each time, as the class

left and I sat there, being nervous that I was about

to get in trouble, she would only remind me.

"Lilly, you are better than what you want 

these peers to see, try and learn something while 

you are here"

Oh my dear, Mrs. Bowman I learned.

I may not know the periodic table but I 

became a nurse and her biology class was all over

the nursing years. 

It seems not fair that this amazing, shy, when

not teaching,woman has the dreaded Alzheimer's.

then I think of the woman I knew way back then and

I know that if she had a choice that someone

she loved, (and she loved us all)

could be spared pain or illness, she would take it.

It is a cross she would carry for anyone else.

As a nurse, I then met the man behind the woman.

Chris, her husband. She spoke of him sometimes

but again, she was more on separating family and work.

I had the privilege of seeing Chris with his very ill mother

when I was her nurse at good old Lady of the Sea.

I loved her, loved taking care of her, requested

her when she was inpatient because I also

knew that with having her as a patient,

I would have good and long conversations

with her son, Chris.

I was an adult now, embarrassed of how

i had acted in his wife's class.

There were times I asked him to apologize to 

her so she would know I grew up to have made

something of myself.

Chris was a caring son and then went

back to teaching and taught my niece and godchild, Tedi.

How she loved him and then we reconnected via Facebook.

Lately, Mrs. Bowman, had to be put into a facility because

being home had become too dangerous

for herself. I know Chris is having a hard time with this

and in private conversations we have had

he wants no one to focus on him,

only the wonderful woman the wife he is loosing daily,

the smartest woman he has ever known slowly 

leaving us all. Yet there is much to be said

about marriage in this little story.

He says he was no saint, and still is not,

that this is marriage, the vows he took,

"for better or worse"

yet, I remind him he is a very important part to

us all in this. AS many of us have taken the same

vows and have not made it. 

The care he has given her, carrying out ever promise

he made to her before she lost who she was,

for me is teaching us all so much.

Yes she was an amazing woman,

still is and I tear up when I think of the smartest woman

I have ever known being lost to this dreaded disease,

but I also know that even as she gets worse, he is still

there every day, still her husband, still following her commands

she made before now.

They are both here to teach us much,

not in the lessons I was supposed to learn way back

when i was in high school

but the lessons of life and for that,

both of them continue to carry out their calling

teachers to us all.