Requiem for a Fetus

There it was. The custodian at my middle school did not believe his eyes, but, raising the top of the toilet tank, sure enough, there it was: a fetus floating facedown– stone cold, dead.

We never found out the color, but it had to be either black or white. Not brown. As an ESL teacher, I knew most of the brown kids and they would have leaked whose it was. That and the timing: I was one of the last in the school to find out.

My classroom was at the far end of the school right next to the gym so when word trickled down to me I knew it wasn’t one of my darlings. Call it the Yuletide Kid’s’ 7th Law of Educational Development: the magnitude of a middle school student’s crime is inversely proportional to the time elapsed.

An emergency faculty meeting was called for 3:25 p.m. sharp. No teacher or teacher’s aide was exempt for any reason whatsoever­– not for a doctor’s appointment, not for an illness in a family, and certainly not for marital or financial problems.

Of course, my colleagues and I went to the media center blind. Sure there were a few who knew something was amiss but most did not have a clue.

Nonetheless there was a certain eerie, funereal atmosphere that permeated the chamber, a cold stiffness and rigidity that brought a tingling, primordial sensation to the skin.

Our principal had a way with words, a true eloquence that she now leaned on to keep us in line.

“You are called here today,” she intoned, “to hear from my lips a true tragedy. A child, no a fetus, has been discovered in one of our restrooms.”

She paused, scanned the room, and awaited an utterance to follow the collective gasp. When no such utterance was forthcoming, she continued: “We need to protect not only ourselves but the name of our school from the prying eyes and ears of the media and the community. I am therefore begging - no, beseeching - you not to utter a single syllable of what transpires between these four walls. Above all, discretion and secrecy are paramount. I cannot stress that enough. So I repeat: discretion and secrecy are paramount. Now, are there any questions?”

“What are we supposed to do if a member of the media calls us at home?” a teacher in the front of the room asked.

“Splendid,” the principal said. “You have anticipated my second and final point. With the assistance of the Crisis Management Team, I have prepared a simple statement that you will receive as you exit this meeting. In essence it says to notify me and only me here at school. Once you have read the statement, you are to hang up the phone immediately. Do not, under any circumstance, allow the journalist to carry on a dialogue with you in any shape, matter, or form. Do I make myself clear?”

The silence was deafening. Something was terribly wrong here. A tribal crime had occurred and all we seemed to care about was our jobs. Were we that gutless a group?

Hardly. Indeed we had a reputation for being a damn tough staff, so why all the cringing and cowering now?

I honestly don’t know. Maybe teachers are a problem-solving lot and here was something we just couldn’t solve. Not up close, anyhow.

I’d like to think that. I’d like to think that it had little to do with fear, with the fact that some of us had kids in college, that others had sick family members that needed both financial and emotional support.

But the truth is: I don’t know. I don’t know now and I certainly did not know then.

None of us did.

None of us do.

There might have been some other questions– a query here or a query there. I really do not recall. A fetus in a toilet has a strange way of shutting people up. Trust me on that.

Oddly I did not feel any bitterness, any animosity, towards my boss who was orchestrating and directing this charade. In fact I admired her leadership, her presence of mind, the way she was trying to protect our school.

But what about the fetus? What about that intricate mass of organs and glands and tissue that had been growing for seven or eight months inside the body of a vital thirteen-year-old girl? There was no talk of a miscarriage or stillbirth. So what was left? I knew the answer to that. Every teacher in the room knew the answer to that.

As expected, the story - though sketchy - broke on the evening news and the next day was covered in the town newspaper. Then it just percolated away. Not a single teacher, to my knowledge, received a telephone call at home, no one was approached either going to or coming from school. The incident just seemed to melt away into some sort of massive mental mist.

That was many, many years ago. Since then the school has continued to evolve. Some teachers have stayed; others have transferred (myself included); even our principal has been promoted to a supervisory position in the central office.

But what about the fetus? Ah, that is the reoccurring question, isn’t it? With each passing year it has grown and matured in my mind. I do not feel any sense of quilt, though I suppose I should. No, what I see is a larger and larger question mark, a question mark strangely in the shape of a gigantic fetus.

Sometimes I find myself speaking to it. The analytical side of me says: “Fetus, you are gone– eaten by the earth or made into ash by the incinerator.”

Or the emotional side of me says: “Fetus, you are still amongst us, ever growing with the absence of your presence. You seem to call out for a collective good-bye, a requiem for the lost.

“Well, Fetus, who can give you that requiem now? We were cowards at your death and, guess what, we are cowards now. You gave us an opportunity to teach, to talk to our students about the mystery of life and death. But that opportunity has gone, long gone.

“And with it went any chance you had.

“Forgive us, Fetus-– we knew but did naught.”