“I never knew grief felt so much like fear.”
CS Lewis’s book about the death of his wife, Helen Joy Davidman, opens with these words. We could also invert them. We never knew fear felt so much like grief.
Post Leaving Cert holidays are controversial and divisive. This is not the time to discuss this troubling rite of passage, so shortly after the deaths of two young men, Andrew O’Donnell and Max Wall.
[ Ios deaths: Funerals of Andrew O’Donnell and Max Wall to take place next weekOpens in new window ]
What can be said with certainty, however, is that no parent waves off a young person on a sixth-year holiday without at least some degree of fear. That is partly why the words “every parent’s nightmare” have been used over and over to describe the deaths of two students from St Michael’s College in Dublin in separate incidents.
It is not that people are somehow unsympathetic to the family and friends of Rory Deegan, aged 22, who died in Greece just days before the two schoolfriends. But the Leaving Cert holds a central place in the Irish imagination. There is something particularly poignant about a young person investing all that focus, hard work and concentration for two years in an exam, and then not living long enough to see the results. It adds to that jagged sense of something cut off, incomplete, unfinished, that is part of any young person’s death.
Their school will have been patient companions on the journey to the Leaving Cert.
No school can ever truly prepare to deal with the sudden and unexpected death of two of its most recent graduates
In the life of every student, depending on their personality, school is there to encourage, chivvy or soothe – or perhaps all three of these – at different moments. The school is there for the highs and lows, the sporting successes, the dodgy mock results, the occasional meltdown when stress overwhelms, the immature pranks that adolescent minds find so enticing.
Every school is acutely aware that this cohort of Leaving Cert students suffered through the pandemic and never sat a Junior Cycle State exam. Some of them are less equipped to deal with acute stress as a result. All these are things a school can and must manage.
However, no school can ever truly prepare to deal with the sudden and unexpected death of two of its most recent graduates, particularly so far from home.
When death takes place far away, the need for somewhere to gather becomes even more acute
The relationship between a teacher and his or her students is in many ways an odd one, both intense and transitory. Teachers will tell you that the best part of the job is watching 12-year-olds grow from children into the first stages of adulthood. Graduation is an important moment, a farewell and a blessing, a recognition that the most important role of the school is almost over. July is normally a peaceful, if somewhat empty month in schools. The State exams are finished. The school reports have been dispatched, the book lists are done, and preparations for the incoming students are complete. All the demanding administrative tasks that grow more extensive at the end of every school year, including hiring new staff from a diminishing pool of candidates, will have either been completed or relegated to August. Exhausted senior management teams will have limped to what they believe is the finish line.
And just as the school settles with a sigh into a brief peaceful interlude before the madness begins again in August, comes the news that is every school’s nightmare. Parents may dread the sixth-year holiday, but fear lurks at the back of every teacher’s mind as well. Will this be the year that tragedy strikes our school?
Even in the early moments of raw grief, there is a vital role to be carried out. When death takes place far away, the need for somewhere to gather becomes even more acute.
The school becomes a focus, a place to come to lay flowers, to write a name and message into books of condolences, and to whisper a prayer in the chapel. Students and families come to find support in the familiar space that is now also a reminder of all that has been lost in such a cruel, unfathomable fashion.
St Michael’s is proud, justly so, of its extensive support system for students, a system that everyone would have hoped and prayed would never have to be deployed in a situation like this. It is proud of its community. South Dublin is a small place in many ways, often criticised for its elitism and networks of privilege.
Who, reading accounts of hundreds of grief-stricken teenagers standing in complete silence as the bodies of two of their companions were taken in coffins away from the island of Ios, could doubt that other, deeper values such as compassion and solidarity are also being implanted?
Report from Ios where tragedy unfolded for two Irish teenagers
Lewis also wrote that grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. The days and years ahead for shattered young people and their families will be challenging. They now know first-hand the precariousness of life. They understand our inability to control or protect against tragedy.
Through it all, the school will be there, keeping the promise made by principal Tim Kelleher, his team and the Spiritan patrons: together, we will maintain hope.