Lament for my son’s school

I didn’t expect to feel this sad.

But the feelings are like the ones I had when I watched my dad decline and die two summers ago.

Except these feelings are not for a person; they are for a building.

Just a couple of months ago, my son’s fifth grade class “graduated” from Paul A. Schalm Elementary School in Clawson, Michigan. They were the 65th and final class to graduate from the school. In the days after they left, crews began gutting it for demolition.

We all knew it was coming. A few years ago, residents in Clawson voted to build a new elementary school, tear down Schalm, and sell the land for new housing. I voted for it. So did my wife. We thought then, as we do now, that making this change is the best course for our school district.

My mind made a sound decision; now my heart must grieve the cost.

Walk out our front door, turn right, walk a few paces to the corner, turn right again, and you can see Schalm Elementary School nine houses away. One of the biggest reasons we bought our home is that it is so close to the school. Every day during the school year, from kindergarten to fifth grade, we made the five-minute walk to Schalm with our son. Every day when we walk the dog, we pass by the school. It is a landmark in our neighborhood. No, it is the landmark in our neighborhood, the heart and nerve center of daily life here.

I work from home. When the weather is nice, I keep the windows open. Many school days, I could hear sounds of laughter and shouting from the Schalm playground. I smiled as I wondered which one of those voices belonged to my son.

I know some people didn’t have my experience with elementary school. But, for me, those years were magic. Full of wonder. Innocent. Lit from within by dreams and lit from without from the love of my parents and teachers.

Now I know what it is like to experience the magic of childhood through my own child. His years at Schalm were not always easy. He had to go through one-and-a-half pandemic years. He struggled with math and reading. But, overall, I feel like he found the magic that I hoped he would find at Schalm.

That’s the magic I felt sometimes when I took the dog for a walk at dusk. We would walk the perimeter of the school, right up alongside it. I could look in the windows and see the classrooms and hallways empty, but lit up. I imagined the kids and teachers in there, busy preparing for a life and world still full of possibilities. Still asking only one question: Why not?

Looking in those lit-up windows, prayers bubbled up. I thanked God for the magic. I asked him to bless and keep the bodies, hearts, and minds of children and their teachers.

But now those classrooms and hallways are dark. Some of the windows are broken. A tall chainlink fence surrounds the building. The trees are cut down. Mountains of rubble are beginning to pile up where kids used to play on playgrounds. Any day now, monstrous machinery will begin crushing and tearing the building apart.

No more children and teachers. No more light. No more magic.

No more playground sounds coming through open windows to make me smile in the middle of the day.

The heart of our neighborhood no longer has a heartbeat.

All that is left is a big, brick corpse waiting for burial.

The cost of adolescence and adulthood is childhood. The cost of flying is leaving the nest. We can’t love our kids and keep them as they are when they are young. If we love them enough to let them fly, we have to nudge them out of the nests we build for them.

Sometimes, we have to abandon those nests, too.

To keep going with life, we have to let go of some things that fit a life that was, but do not fit the life that is and is coming. We have to let those things disappear–maybe even help them disappear. We have to learn to be content being thankful for the memories that are all that remains

Learning to be content being thankful for memories is what I call grief.

So I grieve. For a school, yes, but also for my son’s almost-over childhood in all its glory and magic and wonder. I grieve the fast passing of those days when I was “Daddy” and he was “Pup.” I grieve the end of anything being possible, of hundreds of kids and teachers making Schalm Elementary School a hive of dreams, humming with the eternal life of childhood.

It happened. It was good. I am thankful.

So I grieve.