so yeah, it's July 4th and there's not a day that passes that I don't think of Whitney Grummon, the woman who—to me and so many others—was at once an enigma and an open book, a dazzling mystery and a peaceful soul. I'm not going to use this space to say much about her. With respect to Ms. Grummon, I don't think she taught us enough words to describe what we were left with once her door hung open.
Point being that something really beautiful happened in front of her doorway in the week following. They set up three blank posters and a desk laden with Post-It notes across from the door the first morning. The only thing tacked on the door was a poster that took me half a week to look at properly. And then an explosion: through a week of altering every route to pass in front of Room 21, I watched the school splatter her door with color and love and flowers and candles. I watched classmates I'd never known hold vigil at her doorstep. I watched underclassmen fall silent in her hallway, teachers press palms to her posters, students wander in and out of her doorway aimlessly. The school knit together to try and repair, with its collective strength, the tear in the fiber where Ms. Grummon used to be.
We existed in a trance-like limbo like that for the better part of a week, and then—for better or worse—the gears started turning again. The whiteboards were torn down and the stickies stacked. There was something unfair about that, I think, the same kind of unfairness that took someone like her from someone like us. I wanted badly for there to be a permanent mark on the room where she existed to us, for the colors to emblazon themselves across the wall, for the flowers we piled on her doorstep to take root in the concrete. Something happened here. Someone happened here.
Anyways, that's why this page exists. Something really beautiful happened in front of Ms. Grummon's doorway in the week following, and it deserves to be heard for longer. The love and grief in these notes is startling and raw. We wrote these. Maybe that's good for us to remember about each other in the years approaching.
july 4th 2018