I need to tell you a story, and it is crucial that you see it through to the end. It's about saving lives and preventing catastrophic acts of violence. It's about how YOU (normal, average, you) have the power and authority--and the RESPONSIBILITY--to do those two things. But before I get there, I need to start at the beginning. The story begins sometime in February. We were in our second month of nursing school--brand new, baby nursing students, trying to find our bearings and figure out what the heck all the professors were talking about. There was a boy in our class who seemed nice and happy and sort of socially awkward. We’ll call him T. Many people noticed his behaviors were slightly abnormal, but most of our peers had only passing interactions with him--a few minutes after a lecture, on an elevator ride, walking the stairs, by the bike rack--and therefore witnessed these behaviors in isolated, individual incidences. A couple friends and I, however, had lab with T. Once a week, for two hours, ten of us would gather in a lab room with our instructor and learn the components of a nursing assessment. We’d cordon ourselves off in pairs, in little make-shift “exam rooms,” each consisting of a bed and a pull-around curtain dropped down from the ceiling. The smallness of the group meant ample time for all sorts of conversation, and the content of the lab meant much of the conversation centered around “assessment questions,” that often included health histories and queries into each other’s healthy and unhealthy behaviors. We’d ask each other these questions, and T always seemed to have very strange answers that did not fit within the scope of the conversation. Week after week passed, and my partner and I began to discuss T’s behaviors and answers with each other. “There’s just something...off,” we’d say. “I can’t put a finger on it.” As responsible and perceptive humans are wont to do when we have some sort of a gut check, my partner and I began to observe T more intentionally, both in lab and during lecture. We took note of where he sat, how he arrived to school, to whom he spoke. We’d ask him questions about his life outside of school--about his family and his educational background; about his dreams for the future. We asked these questions because we genuinely cared for T’s well-being and because we needed to decide whether any further action--outside of simply being kind to him and being his friend--might be warranted. After a couple months of friendship and observation, we began to mention some pieces of our observations to our classmates. We’d bring T up in conversation and see if anyone else offered up stories of encounters with him. These conversations were always light-hearted and nonthreatening, but my partner and I were constantly taking mental notes of common threads and of the different (and similar) experiences our fellow classmates had had with T. We’d perk up our ears and glance T’s way when he was being asked to perform assessments in lab. We noticed that he would fail components of the practical exams that we had been rehearsing since day one--things that no one else was even coming close to failing. We noticed that when the instructor would say “No, T, that is 100% incorrect. If you do that on the final, you will fail this course,” T would reply in a most aloof manner: “Really? I had no idea!” His responses to our instructor were nonsensical and very...odd. Around the same time, T’s lab partner said something to us about some things T had been telling him during their practice assessments. We made mental notes and kept observing. One day, we pulled our instructor aside. “We have some concerns regarding one of our fellow classmates,” we said. “We’d like to bring them to your attention.” She took us out in the hall, and we made her aware of our observations over the past couple months. “We just feel like something is very strange,” we said. “We are concerned he may be at risk of harm to himself or others.” Our instructor thanked us for our concern and dealt with the situation in a manner she deemed appropriate. After that lab, my partner and I stayed in the lab room with T and his partner to finish up an assignment. I had become very frustrated by T and his confusing antics, and so I began to question him--gently but boldly. I asked him WHY he always gave such strange answers during our assessments. I told him we knew he was lying--that his answers were completely nonsensical and illogical. I said: “You tell us you don’t know what ‘smoking’ is. You have been outside. You have seen someone smoke. YOU KNOW WHAT SMOKING IS. So why are you lying to us?” I felt scared of him because I did not understand where his answers and behaviors were coming from--I wanted him to help me understand. He said to me, to us: “I am an angelic being. Becuase I am angelic, I cannot associate with bad things and so I have to pretend that I don’t even know what those bad things are. There are only two reasons god throws angels out of heaven--either to punish them or because they have become too powerful. He threw me out for the latter reason.” He then went on to ask us if we had ever been to the fifth dimension and told us he goes there often--that he isn’t “here all the time.” He told us that, being a spiritual being, he was never actually born. We registered this as a contradiction because the week prior, he had told us he was born to two Asian parents and had a loving family. At this point, he began asking us strange questions, such as if we had ever been handcuffed or gagged. He asked us if we have easy access to dynamite and told us he does, and that he likes it. These sorts of questions were outside of his normal lines of conversation--he had always said strange things but had never before spoken of things of violent or fear-inducing nature, save one time when he told us he’d always wanted to be a cop so that he could “have power over people.” Circling back to his angelic being bit, I gently explained to him that “pretending to not know what bad things are” is the same thing as lying--and that lying isn’t holy, so he wasn’t really doing himself any favors en route to holiness. I then told him that, in any case, being holy in no way prohibits one from knowing of bad things because, after all, Jesus hung out with sinners all the time! At the name of Jesus, T’s face contorted, and he firmly grasped the metal tuning fork in his hand and hit his other hand with the fork. I found this behavior disturbing and began to discern a possible demonic origin. I continued to say the name of Jesus Christ, and T continued to hit his hand harder and harder with the tuning fork, face contorted. It seemed as though he wanted to hit me, but was unable to do so. My partner and T’s partner saw the incident, and the four of us left the lab quite promptly. My partner and I continued to discuss all that had happened, and the culmination that seemed to have happened on that day. We realized that our lab instructor had not understood the fullness of the intuition we had, and we knew we needed to continue to take action until a natural conclusion had been reached. Not knowing where to turn, I sent a quick email off to a lady in Student Affairs that simply said: “We have a concern about a fellow student. We think there is a possibility that he could be a harm to himself or others. Can you please direct us to the appropriate resource? We want to get him help.” Within five minutes I received a phone call. “Hi, this is Student Affairs. Please come to our office immediately, and bring your friends.” In the Student Affairs office, we gave a detailed report of the prior two months. We also informed them that T wore the same outfit to school every day (a lesson in observation) and that he “was not at school today,” when he had never once before missed a class in all of nursing school. His not being in class that day was especially concerning, and we asked that they make plans to contact him immediately and determine his whereabouts. We left the office knowing that the two Student Affairs women would be on top of things and deciding that, if they weren’t, we would continue to take action ourselves. For the next week, T did not show up at school. Every time the door of the lecture hall would click open, my partner and I would jump in our seats and whip our heads around to see who was coming in. I have never before (or since) felt that kind of anxiety. A week later, Student Affairs called a meeting with us and told us that our concern had been taken seriously. T had been pulled from school for the week and evaluated by a psychiatrist and a counsellor, both of whom deemed him psychologically stable and cleared him to return to school. My friends and I sat in that meeting, stunned. “Thank you for the information,” we said through shaky voices. “We do not believe the counsellor or psychiatrist was correct in their evaluation, but we appreciate you taking our concern seriously, and we hope we can trust their professional judgment.” Though T had been cleared to come back to classes, he remained absent from school. The next week, some police showed up on campus looking for us. They wanted our identification information so they would have record of a formal report filed. We obliged. We also informed them, in passing, that T had not yet returned to school. They were taken completely aback: “But he was cleared a week and a half ago! You mean he hasn’t been back to school since?” “Correct,” we replied. Two days later, we were called back into the Student Affairs office. “We are so sorry to inform you that T’s body was found in a van near Texas Tech. You absolutely did the right thing, and we are so proud of you for trying to help him. There was nothing more you could have done. This is an absolute tragedy. We have no further information at this time and will be informing the class via a mandatory meeting on Friday.” We sat, stunned. Had we really done all we could? The school offered us their counseling services and answered the question we all had deep down inside--"no, you did not push him over the edge. In fact, you were likely a ray of hope in his very sad and broken heart. We cannot say more at this time, but we know that he knew you cared about him and were trying to get him help." The mandatory meeting happened, and many meetings after that. Talk started going around-- “Jordan and her friends bullied him--we heard them talking about him in the halls sometimes.” The onslaught continued. I’d come home and sit on my stairs and sob. Lord God, I know I did the right thing. I know that I know that I know. My two friends know that, too. But the rest of our class cannot possibly know all that we knew. They weren’t involved in the weekly conversations. They didn’t hear the sorts of things we did. They were not compiling documents of incidences and piecing the puzzle together. And yet they’re blaming those of us who were. How can we ever explain to them all we knew? How will they ever understand how much courage it took for us to take the sort of action we did? How will they ever know how many hours we’ve spent processing this all, mulling it over, crying in our beds late at night? How will they ever understand that we only did this because of how much we cared? For T...and for them. And yet, we didn’t fire back at them. We let them continue the shaming and the guilting and the criticism. What else was there to do? It was a sensitive time--we were all broken-hearted over the loss of T--and we didn’t feel that defending ourselves or rehearsing all the things T had said and done to make us take action was appropriate at the time.
We sat in on the "group counseling" sessions. I sat in the back row, shaking mad and unable to speak. Classmates kept speaking up and saying things they knew to be true, from their experiences. I had to sit silently with my knowledge...with my gut-check--a gut-check that, despite evidence to the contrary, continued to say: "there is more to this story." Many of us attended his funeral. We hugged his parents and sat behind his relatives. We told them we were so sorry for the loss of their son, brother. And we were, are. We decided maybe (?) we had been wrong--maybe there was no need to have been afraid of him. Maybe he was only ever at risk for harm to himself, not to us. And yet, we still weren't settled. Night after night I’d read his obituary. Our classmates would comment things like: “T was always so happy.” “T was the first person to say hi to me when I arrived at nursing school.” “T smiled at me every day.” Those things were all true--but my two friends and I knew a very different side of T. This is what I’d tell my classmates, when they confronted me with doubts about my intentions in taking action: “Look, we are each responsible for our own circus and our own monkeys. You saw T in brief encounters, and therefore you never noticed any concerning behaviors. That’s okay! How could you be expected to? We, on the other hand, saw T for hours on end. Because of our coincidental placement with him in lab, we were in a position of responsibility toward him and toward each other. I don’t at all blame you for *not* taking action; you cannot blame me *for* doing so. We, as humans, are responsible to handle what we know. I believe my friends and I handled what we knew with the utmost care, and correctness. I also believe you handled what you knew in the right manner.” This is a good life lesson. You may be THE BEST (often only) PERSON IN A GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCE to do something. SO DO IT. No one else is going to. If you are there, and you’re the “jordan and her 2 friends,” accept that role and get on with it. You have action to take. We mourned the loss of T, each in our own way, and school continued. Another semester passed. And now, almost another. Two days ago, I received a call from Student Affairs. “Hi, Jordan. The investigation surrounding T and his death is complete, and the case has been closed. We would like to meet with the three of you at your earliest convenience.” We had not expected a call like this. We did not know there had been an investigation. We did not know anything was “pending...” {For the sake of length, part 2 is forthcoming...}
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.Lovely Ladies! I've got an invitation for you:
I am participating in a "secret sister" gift exchange ((such a fun way to spread holiday and cozy-weather cheer, amiright?)) Anyone interested in joining in? It doesn't matter where you live - YOU ARE INVITED! Ladies of *any age* can join in on the fun--the more the merrier. You buy ONE gift valued at $10+ and send it to one secret sister, and, as long as friends continue to participate, you will receive gifts in return. Let me know if you are interested, and I will send you the information. Please don't ask to participate if you are not willing to spend the $10...and make the quick trip to the post office (or send directly from online--Amazon Prime and include a little gift message...?) COMMENT if you're in, and I will send you the info! I've got my gift all ready to be mailed and will write an accompanying letter this evening. Promise promise promise this is going to be worth it. <3 |
hey, i'm jordan.wife to one, mama to four, bible-believing christian. Archives
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