Living On

Tending to Endings (forty-five)

Legacy has always seemed to me a weighty word, reserved for the powerful or wealthy or famous. People who get buildings and scholarships and highways named after them. To think or write about my own legacy would seem pretentious and related to image or ego.

And then I think of Marian Pritchett who I met in the late 1990s, at what was then known as Booth Memorial School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens. The school was housed in a brick building in Boise’s leafy north end. Teenagers who were pregnant or new parents could learn child development along with algebra at a school with onsite day care, and guidance on college applications.

I was going to visit the school once a week through a relatively new nonprofit arts program called Writers in the Schools. I was enthused about this assignment. I had twin toddlers myself, and I knew how pregnancy and birth opened a huge opportunity for creativity.

But my enthusiasm was no match for Marian’s whose eyes lit up at our planning meeting when I told her about writing poetry with the students and putting together a book at the end of the semester. She smiled widely and said she was just sure the program was going to be wonderful. She couldn’t wait for me to meet her students.

What I thought next was that Marian must be a new teacher.  All that positive energy and no shadow of skepticism or the edgy humor I was used to in veteran teachers, even the most caring.  Teenagers have a way of breaking your heart, after all.

When I was getting ready to leave, I asked Marian how long she had taught at Booth. “This is my twentieth year,” she said, “Before that I was at Boise High.” Marian, it turns out, was also the school principal.

Over the next few years I visited Booth every Wednesday, and the students and Marian and I all wrote together. I learned that Marian’s enthusiasm was not just demeanor. She backed it up with unwavering support for her students. She showed up for them whether they were showing up for themselves or not. She called them when they didn’t make it to class. She sat with them as they filled out college applications. When they read their poems aloud after our writing time, her eyes often glistened with tears and pride. Marian consistently reflected back to her students their own intelligence, and strength, worth.

I was writing for parenting magazines during that time, and I worked with one of the young moms who had graduated from Booth to write her story for American Baby Magazine. Jaimie Skinner wrote about the transformation that happened after she arrived at the school:

Marian’s death in 2002 of a brain aneurysm was unexpected and devastating for her family and her students and all of us who knew her. I attended her funeral still heavy with shock and grief. When I entered the church, it was already full of so many young women with children by their side, and some not so young anymore. The crowd grew and grew–her family and her students and former students and their families and her colleagues and leaders in the community–until people could no longer squeeze into the pews.

I do not remember much of what was said at that service almost two decades ago, but I remember all those babies on all those laps and the way their coos and their cries lifted us. It was the first time I had that strange sensation at funeral or memorial service, of grief being matched with gratitude. How empty the loss and how full the love left behind.

Later that year, the school name was changed to Marian Pritchett High School, and teachers continued to help many young women and eventually young fathers, too, to continue their education after becoming parents.

Last year, the campus was sold and after some attempts at moving the school the district instead combined it with another alternative high school. It was a heartbreaking loss for the community. But I will always think of Marian’s legacy not as any building or school but as all those women and their children and the lives they are living.

To me, this is the most profound form of legacy, the way we become a part of each other’s stories. On this count, Marian outdid herself.

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I reached out again to Jaimie, when I started working on this post. We hadn’t talked since we met at a coffee shop all those years ago to plan the story. She is now mom to two daughters and two sons. The daughter she wrote about in the magazine article has recently graduated college. Jaimie is a teacher having worked for five years overseas and now back at a high school in Boise where she teaches English to new immigrants including refugees who have resettled here.

Last year, she and her husband founded Rising Phoenix a youth leadership organization with an international service-learning focus. They sponsor children in Rwanda and the Congo.

Jaimie and I talked about Marian and how she influences us still. She talked about the idea of legacy:

I don’t really care if I’m remembered, but I want to make a difference in my student’s lives. I talk about Marian to my students all the time. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t had someone like that in my life at that time. In that way I want to continue her legacy.

And maybe that is why remembering people matters. Not so much to give credit, which I doubt would have mattered to Marian. But so that we remember what they have given us that we can now carry forward.

Marian, who was never officially my teacher, may have influenced my teaching more than anyone else over the next twenty years. Through her example, she gave me permission to enthusiastically believe in my students even when the odds might not seem in their favor. She lived the adage that love is a verb by showing up for students each day in big and small ways. If I ever questioned the effectiveness of this philosophy, all I had to do was think back to that afternoon in that church and that strong beautiful community who gathered to say thank you and goodbye.

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