My apologies to those not familiar with the vernacular that a small-town Kansas boy might use.  My background is splattered with family and friends who have always used different little colloquiolisms as a regular part of their vocabulary.  Spend more than 5 minutes at a family gathering, and you will find that “I’ll be durned” is used early and often.  “I’ll be durned” can mean a variety of things, ranging from, “That’s interesting”, to “That can’t be true”, to “You really did that?”  My dad has often claimed that my mom is a Missouri hillbilly, and she reinforces his claim with statements like “wrinching a warshrag” and stopping at “Walmarts”.  “Coulda, shoulda, woulda” could be added to that list.

I pause at this time to explain a little about how the writing process works for me.  I’m not an “on the clock” blogger.  I can’t sit down at a specific time each night and write.  I’d be a horrible newspaper writer with deadlines.  A post floats around in my head for awhile before I’m ready for it to come out, what I have jokingly referred to as “dumping my brain”.  I told a friend the other day that it’s like cheese, it has to cure and ferment, otherwise, it’s just spoiled milk.  Blogging for me is more about quality (hopefully) and less about quantity. 

 

This one has been bouncing around in my head for a couple weeks.  There is a hint of avoidance, because I’ve not wanted to tackle the subject.  A couple weeks ago, a middle school student  in my community died tragically due to a gunshot wound.  I coached the young man on my son’s team in baseball for the last 5 or so summers.  I’m friends with his family, and his older sister is one of the top athletes and students in our entire community, not just our high school.  I know I haven’t really dealt with my feelings about this incident.  I’ve worked through loved ones dying often enough to know that actually realizing I haven’t dealt with it is a good first step.  I know that I’ve really been on auto-pilot about this whole situation since I first received a phone call that morning at about 5:30 AM.  That’s when I started calling others in our district to let them know so they could  prepare to help kids that we knew would be hurting that day.  The entire day literally seems like a distant memory of something I watched, and it was only about 2 weeks ago.  What made this even harder to comprehend and deal with was the fact that a classmate of this young man had also died tragically about 1.5 years earlier, a young man who also played on the team I had coached that previous summer.  The amount of grief those boys have dealt with is more than many of us have dealt with in a lifetime.  My heart hurts for them and my concern for them is genuine.

 

Last week, the grandson of a my high school coach died in a similarly tragic way.  I didn’t know him personally, he lived several hours away.  Today, I attended his funeral.  Again, I saw the pain that people were dealing with as someone was gone from their lives way too early.  Again, I heard stories about this young man in happier times.  Sadly, it was all to familiar.

Mental health is something that I have been acutley aware of for a large part of my life.  I have had family members suffer with mental health issues, both when I was a kid growing up and also in my adult life.  I had a family member that had to spend some time in an inpatient clinic during my high school years.  That was difficult in many different ways.  Though it isn’t now and it shouldn’t have been then, at the time, it was embarrassing.  There is this stigma attached with mental health.  If my family member had to go away to be treated for cancer, I would not have shied away from talking about that, but words like “loony bin” and “psycho ward” help attach shame to this type of illness.  And in retrospect, how sad is that?  Part of what makes mental health treatment so frustrating is that we really don’t know a lot more now than we did years ago.  There haven’t been the advances like we have had in other areas of medicine.  When I was 4, I fell from a tree and broke my arm.  I spent 18 days in the hospital in traction.  When my son was little, he incurred the exact same fracture when he fell down.  Within 36 hours, he had surgery and was back home.  Medicine had advanced. 

 

With mental health, other than newer drug treatments, even the professionals are often left scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to treat an illness that we still don’t understand very well.  So the frustration we face as educators trying to help young people who may be suffering from these type of issues is overwhelming at times.  If I see a student limping down the hallway it is obvious to me that they are suffering in some physical way.  Seeing a student who is suffering mentally is so much harder to ascertain.  A lot of it takes opening our eyes and our hearts to being receptive  to seeing that.  In our rush to do the things in our task-oriented world, we can miss that sometimes.

So at this point, you are probably wondering about the title of this post.  Even though I have had more exposure to the mental health world than many, I am still, very much so, a layman.  In my attempt to be at peace with these tragic situations, I think of that phrase:  coulda, shoulda, woulda.  I saw the young man who passed two weeks ago two nights before he died.  He was at a baseball game for our high school.  He was sitting up behind home plate and laughing with a group of friends.  It’s the memory of him I will always carry, besides ones of him on the baseball field.  Sometimes I think I “coulda” gone over and said hello, or I “shoulda” at least waved up at him to say hi.  Knowing what I know now, I wish that I “woulda” done one of those.  Regret sucks, but I also realize it is a fruitless emotion.  We need to make sure we take the time to tell loved ones how we feel, how much they mean to us.  We need to reach out to others that may be hurting.  My hope is that instead of thinking “coulda, shoulda, woulda” we can be proactive with “can, shall, will” and possibly ease the hurting that others may be feeling.