Ugh.
The kids went too? If so, how are they processing things?
My two step-sons went. My kids didn't. We don't have them this weekend and they didn't know him.
It is hard to know how they are dealing with it all, exactly. There was also a meeting with a grief counselor for the Boy Scout troop a few weeks back. At both things the parents (including Wife 2.0 and me) were getting choked up, tearing up, or outright sobbing but the kids were mostly sorta blank.
Any 19 year old killing himself is tragic. But the thing that was extraordinary about this is what kind of kid this was.
The second speaker yesterday was his science teacher from his freshman year in HS. She thought he was a great kid when she had him in her class for the year. Then she was diagnosed with some kind of cancer, I think the summer between his freshman and sophomore year.
She kept teaching through chemo and he came in to help her out with things basically
every day until she got better. It sounds like he was sometimes there multiple times a day. He cleaned up around the classroom and was positive and encouraging the whole time. He dealt with a situation where she puked a waste basket during a class. He brought her an aquarium and a turtle, to help her feel better. Then he took care of the turtle for her, feeding it and cleaning the aquarium. She said that as a teacher she really hopes to make a positive impact beyond the curriculum on even just a few of her students every year and said that, in his case, the kid was the one who inspired her.
If her speech had been in a script of a movie or TV show I would have dismissed it as being over the top and unrealistic.
All the speeches were like that. Everybody talked about how empathic, optimistic and helpful he was. I came away both incredibly heart-broken but also feeling inspired to try to be a better person myself.