My senior year of high school, one of the members of my church passed away from cancer. Her name was Mary Beth. She was a Sunday school teacher for the ninth grade and while she didn’t know it, she helped me understand that being depressed didn’t make me an outcast. In a way, she humanized it. There are so many stigmas and ideas about how we’re supposed to be and having depression makes life so much harder, it’s nearly impossible to reach those societal standards.
The Sunday school class was supposed to be a discussion about morals. One day, we were talking about going to hell and someone had mentioned how killing yourself meant you’d go to hell. My teacher immediately responded with, “No, because you don’t know what’s going through their head.” That one response hit me very hard, because it made what I was going through more human. Feeling suicidal doesn’t mean you’re a bad person who’s going to hell, it just means you’re struggling. It was something I really needed to hear.
Mary Beth was diagnosed with cancer my junior year of high school and I was asked to help teach her class. I took on the role, though I wasn’t entirely sure what to do since this was my first time helping out. I got through the year and she seemed to be doing better. However, the cancer came back the next year, slowly getting worse. I wanted to see her and tell her just how much of an impact she made in my mental health journey. When she ended up in hospice, I thought about writing her a letter, but I never did. She passed away before I could tell her what she meant to me. I was so caught up in my struggle in school that I didn’t take the time to tell her. If I could go back in time, I’d write that letter or visit her. I’d tell her exactly what she did for me. I’d have wanted her to know just how amazing she really was.
She had accepted her death. She said she was willing to go with God’s plan. She was an amazing woman, a fair judge, and a great Sunday school teacher. I just wish I didn’t let the opportunity pass me by.
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