Running, Fighting, and Writing

A dear friend and colleague, Jenn Cook, was killed on Friday, March 14, 2014 by an 86 year old man driving a Mazda truck.  She was walking with her mom, who was badly hurt but is now recovering.  Jenn was 43.  She was recently and happily married to Moira Collins.  Theirs was the best wedding we have ever been to, Nels and I agreed, even better than our own.  They were still like newlyweds, in that their care and attention for one another was profound and gentle.  Their wedding picture is still on our fridge as a reminder of what my mom would call “a happy day.”    

Jenn was a tireless advocate for teachers and students, someone who constantly stretched her intellectual muscles and those of everyone around her by delving into new ideas as far-ranging as using comic books in the classroom, engaging in research with friends from Great Britain on bringing inquiry into the undergraduate curriculum, and, I just found out, was known as THE person in RI to contact for Connected Learning.  In our last conversation, the week before she died, I was delighted to have convinced her to teach a qualitative research course in the Ph.D. Program in Education.  I also told her to see the movie Nebraska because of her close relationship with her elderly and ailing father.  The care that the son in the movie took with his cranky father was how I imagined Jenn with her dad:  attentive, supportive, and taking great care of his fragilities without being stultifying.   

In short, this world has suffered a huge loss.  I have suffered a huge loss. 

While I have written plenty of wrenching pages in my journal in the last month, I have not shared anything publicly yet, mostly because I want it to be good enough.  But just like the old poets said and Jenn taught, if I wait for that, then I will never send anything out.  I will never be able to fully capture who she was and what she meant, not only to me, but to her friends, colleagues, and students.  But I can still write and share (and so can you).  One blog will never do her justice, nor do justice to the many shades of emotion that I have experienced over the past month.  So, I have decided to write a series, not in the cloying sense of she-was-so-perfect (she wasn’t, and she was okay with that), but in the gritty current reality that all of us who knew and loved her now inhabit. 

 This stark actuality was echoed by one of the survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings.  She said, “You have to come to terms with knowing that your life can change in an instant.”  She lost her leg.  I lost a friend.  I don’t know exactly how my life will change—that’s still evolving and inconsistent.  One day I’m more compassionate and patient.  The next, I want to rip off someone’s head, as I become ever-more aware of that deep reservoir of anger I harbor, similar to Turtle Lake in Diary of a Part-time Indian or how Thoreau describes Walden Pond:  so deep that the bottom can’t be measured, maybe because it reaches the other side of the earth. 

Joey, one of Jenn’s students said, “I want to kill that driver.”  Apparently, I do too.  Last Tuesday was a dark and dreary day, and Nels and I ran our town route to keep close to home in case the rain became unbearable.  I remember being really upset with drivers, thinking that they weren’t stopping or paying enough attention.  Later, Nels told me that I was the aggressive one, practically daring drivers to hit me.  It’s true, I realize now.  I wanted to yell at someone, maybe have an excuse to punch a jaw and feel my fist hurt, hear bone against bone, even though I have no idea what that feels like.  Nels, playing amateur psychologist (ironically, his degree is in psychology), could see what I couldn’t:  that I wanted to punish someone, and since the driver who killed Jenn was unavailable, any other driver would have to do.

Luckily for the drivers in Bristol that day and for me (and for Nels, who would have had to defend me or the unlucky driver), that particular wave of emotion has passed, at least for now.  He didn’t even have to set up the Wii boxing for me to get out my aggressions that way. 

Instead, there will be another, much more appropriate way to honor Jenn this coming week.  On Friday, April 25, from 2-5 p.m., there will be a writing marathon held in her honor, starting at Donovan Dining Hall in the Faculty Center and moving across campus from there. 

If you are unable to attend this event, you can still participate by contributing to the “Who Is Jennifer Cook?” project that three students started.  Write about what Jenn--Dr. Cook--meant to you.

Please send your responses to one of the following:

JNTomich@gmail.com

AHart420@gmail.com

KSawyer.429@gmail.com

Thank you.  Those of us who loved her, or even just knew her, can engage in the healing work of writing, something Jenn believed in wholeheartedly.

This photo is from the RIWP event two years ago.  I'm so delighted that a photographer got this picture of Jenn and me.