The orchid collector

For some reason, today I am remembering my eccentric eighth-grade advanced-math teacher and her unsettling death.

She taught algebra in a dynamic and engaging — although not always effective — manner. A glass enclosure spanning the back wall of her classroom, the inside wallpapered with desert scenes, was said to have previously held an iguana. That was also said to be only a rumor, although I never quite figured out why else someone would have such a tank. She must have had some affinity for the tropical nonetheless; a waxy-leafed potted tree stretched up to the 20-foot ceiling, and in her personal life she was an enthusiastic collector and grower of orchids.

On one occasion in class, she implored us to always properly dispose of our chewing gum by way of a rather disturbing anecdote of a time she had come across a squirrel choking to death on discarded gum. The story, recalling it now, sounds apocryphal or at least embellished, but I assure you that the vigor with which she recounted it rendered the distinction between fact and fiction trivial.

When I think of her now, though, I cannot help but reflect on her death. It was one of those things that they call a freak accident. (I imagine that everyone knows someone who knows someone who died in a freak accident.)

Irrepressively athletic, still a long-distance runner and cross-country coach into her early 70s, she had been exercising at the gym when she sustained some kind of minor puncture wound on one of the machines. A rare infection took hold, and several increasingly extreme amputations later, she slipped into a coma and died. Her illness lasted about three months, the obituaries said.

In addition to the bizarre, terrifying nature of the death — imagine being forced to progressively trim away your limbs only to succumb regardless — the incident captivated me because it occured after I had crossed the barrier of self-awareness that separates a child from a young adult (whatever that is anyway) and to someone whom I had known exclusively before I had crossed that barrier.

Everyone’s middle-school math teacher dies, of course. It is a more or less universal experience to be reminded of someone you had forgotten by the news of their death. What fascinates me is the way that you realize at some point in your young adulthood that you had forgotten to revise your assumption that the adults who were in your life when you were a child would live forever. Upon hearing that Mrs. or Mr. So-and-so has died, you briefly reminisce, patch up that seam in their conception of the world, consider how your own parents will die or have died, and move on.

It does not usually conjure the sort of imagery that her death conjures, a slow nightmare visited upon a woman who had done nothing to invite it.