There was this student — I’ll call her Sadie — in one of my classes at Moravian College in the mid-90s. She was one of those people whose body language in the first week of the semester said clearly, “I don’t want to be here.” I noticed but did not call her out. After a while, though, she seemed to respond to my student-centered approach and began to perk up and engage. She was smart, sensitive, and articulate, although troubled. Divorced parents, but that wasn’t her only problem. She just came from a different place, socially and emotionally, than most of her classmates.
She did well in that class — finished with a B, at least. At the time, I was close friends with a political science professor who also knew Sadie as a student. This guy, I’ll call him Gray, appreciated having troubled students so he could burrow into their problems and provide a caring listener. We shared some basic information about her, nothing too personal, but we were aware that she needed special handling.
At the end of that semester, we learned that Sadie was dead. That was the official word from the college. Gray, with his extra-sensitive radar for troubled students, learned the circumstances: she had overdosed on heroin.
Sadie, who was a commuter at a residential college, had few friends among her Moravian classmates; she went her own way. Along that way, she met a guy who was a user of hard drugs. Then fate intruded.
One May Saturday, she was walking over to Lehigh University, our across-the-river neighbor in Bethlehem. To get to “The Hill,” as the social scene at Lehigh was called, a pedestrian had to cross the Hill-to-Hill Bridge over the Lehigh River. Not usually a problem, but on this day there’d been a traffic accident on the bridge that included a chemical spill. The bridge was closed to all traffic, vehicular and pedestrian. Sadie, though, being independent-minded, knew that she could easily climb the railroad trestle that roughly paralleled the H-to-H Bridge and cross the river that way. There she met her druggie friend, who invited her to shoot up with him. She accepted. He survived; she did not.
The sudden death of any student is shocking and deeply disturbing, especially at a small college where teachers may get to know and work closely with students, as I and Gray had with Sadie. Her funeral was set during finals week. Talking with Gray, I said I’d send a card to Sadie’s mother. Which I did. It was a secular card. I’m not conventionally religious, and Gray was an atheist, but I found something generically appropriate. I never know what to say to someone grieving, especially a mother grieving her child who had, essentially, been murdered. At the time, my head was full of an album by Iris Dement: her debut, I think it was, called Infamous Angel. Words from the title song came to me, and I put them in my card: “Infamous Angel, going home.” Signed my name and Gray’s and dropped it in the mail.
A few days later, Sadie’s mother phoned me. Touched by the card and the expression that two of her daughter’s profs had sent, she pressed me for the source of the lines I had quoted. I told her; she thanked me. Then I called Gray to tell him of this interaction. He knew not the song or the words. When I told him, his knees dropped to the floor (in a manner of speaking) and his temper rose. He scolded me for attaching his name to a religious sentiment. He got no apology from me, and for a while we weren’t on speaking terms.
Infamous Angel includes several gospel songs, originals by Ms. Dement. No, I’m not religious, but neither am I an atheist. I can appreciate originality and certain creative expressions of belief. Here, without apology, is Iris’s song:
Rhetorman 