I was driving to work when I first heard about the teenager being stabbed. I focused on it with the half-hearted interest we all experience in a world of chronic violence, but I listened enough to know that it happened a few miles from my school.

When I sat down at my desk that morning, another teacher stopped by. She mentioned the stabbing and said that when she saw the story on TV that morning, she’d realised that this tragedy reached into my classroom. Anabel (her name, and all others, are pseudonyms), one of my students, had lost her brother.

Anabel has the most expressive face of any child I have ever known. When she is excited, her mouth becomes a Venetian gondola. When she is upset, the corners of her lips seem to reach the sides of her chin. When she thinks deeply, her churning ideas wrinkle her face into a raisin.

I have no background in child psychology, other than what I’ve picked up along the way as a teacher and a dad. I have also never taught a child who has suffered so immediate and so violent a loss. In the 10 minutes between my colleague telling me about Anabel and Anabel walking into my room, I thought through what I would say to her. I did not have any good ideas.

When Anabel came in, there was no mistaking her emotions. Through sobs and moans, she told me everything: “My brother, he died…Someone put a knife…And they don’t know…He died…My dad said…And maybe it was…Yeah, the knife went over here and over here and over here…And he died.”

Anabel’s story is not mine to tell, so I will not attempt to dive further into her personal darkness and name emotions that may not have names.

As a male teacher, I generally shy away from hugging my students and instead show affection through high-fives, pats on the back and fist bumps. As a human, I hugged Anabel. I had nothing to offer her but my arms and my ears. When she stopped crying for a moment, she decided to hang up her jacket and put away her backpack.

Mornings in first grade (Year 2) are a flurry of small bodies bouncing into the classroom to eat breakfast and shout their most immediate needs in what amounts to a sort of Wall Street trading floor of things that must be either opened (milk, breakfast syrup, backpacks, jackets with stuck zippers) or closed (milk that is spilling, breakfast syrup that is spilling, untied shoes, the assorted bandageable wounds of childhood). Anabel needed me most and first, but with only one adult in the room, there were many unmet demands on my attention.

The school counsellor came to chat to me, and suggested letting Anabel say as much as she wanted during our class’s morning meeting. She told her classmates all of what she understood, with a level of composure and detail that I could not imagine in myself at that early stage of grief. Horrifyingly, and unsurprisingly, a few students who had recently immigrated from Central America made connections to other people they knew who had died before their time.

I was reminded again just how little my students’ lives resemble mine. When I was about two years old, my parents told me that our old cat went to live on a farm because she needed more space to run around than our apartment could offer her. This, I would later find out, was a lie. Our apartment was not too small, and the financial argument for a farm of old cats makes little sense. When I was a few years older, two of my great-grandparents also died, though at this point I was older, and there was no mention of a farm.

By the time I was six - Anabel’s age - my direct experience of death consisted of an elderly pet and two octogenarians. That’s it. I understood that dying was natural, expected, and not caused by the people with whom I share this Earth. It becomes cliché for anyone involved in urban education, but it bears repeating that so many of our students already know so much more than we do.

Unguarded curiosity

When Anabel finished telling her story, her friends wanted to talk. As an adult in a society where people speak of death with circumspection, I was on uncertain footing with the directness of my students’ questions, as well as Anabel’s lack of euphemism and caution in her answers.

Where did they stab him? Here, here and here, as she gestured to different parts of her own body. Why did they stab him? He was so beautiful and they didn’t like that. Who did it? A big, giant group of bad people. Did you catch the bad people? The police have to look.

Some of her information was incorrect. When a first-grader tells me he went to Disney World over the weekend, I sometimes question the plausibility of the story and encourage him to tell me a real story because his real life is so interesting. Fact-checking would have served no purpose that morning so I chose to be quiet and let Anabel teach this particular lesson.

Like most elementary school teachers, I often look for picture books that connect to what we learn in class, so I set out to find something for Anabel.

I soon discovered that, while there are many books that address loss and grief in terms that make sense to young children, most of them handle natural death at old age or after an illness. I could be wrong, but there appears to be no book that discusses a sibling being killed on a sidewalk. Many children’s books about death also follow a religious tradition, which would have been inappropriate for me to share with Anabel. In any case, she had already articulated her own spiritual views: “My brother is an angel now,” she said.

I took a moment to formulate what to say next. I wanted to give her room to say more, so I asked her, “What does that mean?”

“You know,” she explained, as if genuinely surprised that I could be so oblivious, “he has wings and he lives in the sky and he’s with God and he can see me and he loves me. But he’s also in a box,” she clarified.

i did eventually find a book that I thought might resonate with Anabel: Always Remember, written by Cece Meng and illustrated by Jago. Through gorgeous illustrations and graceful text, we mourn the loss of a sea turtle (his cause of death is purposely ambiguous), and hear cherished stories about him that his marine-creature friends will “always remember”.

Anabel and I sat down together and started to read, neither of us getting through it without tears. At the end, Anabel asked me how the turtle died. I asked her what she thought and she proposed that maybe he got sick. I wanted to normalise what had happened to Anabel’s brother so I said that maybe there was another animal who did something bad to the turtle. I have no idea if that was the right thing to do or if I made her more afraid by establishing this possibility.

Anabel’s loss was a community experience. All of her classmates knew that her brother had died, all of them had to process it and most of them attempted to help Anabel in some way. Since my students are 6 and 7, they generally believe that more of a good thing is better than less of a good thing, so a good number of them tried to hug Anabel relentlessly, as if their zealous affection could erase her pain.

Needless to say, Anabel didn’t like that very much. At one point, I improvised a puppet show that starred a grief-stricken elephant and an overly compassionate duck who would not stop hugging the elephant and patting her back. The duck learned that she could comfort the elephant more by asking, “What do you need?” or “Would you like a hug?” Anabel’s friends recognised that they were the duck. They laughed at seeing themselves this way and gave Anabel a little more space after that.

Anabel was not the only student with emotional needs in my classroom. One little boy, Yasil, is currently dealing with the absence of a parent as a result of substance abuse. Because of that trauma, he struggles to cope with frustration. During a recent writing lesson, Yasil wanted to share an idea. Since some of his classmates needed a chance to participate as well, I did not call on Yasil immediately. When he started to cry, Anabel put her hand on his back and reminded him that everything would be OK. I actually had to pause the lesson for a moment to comprehend the capaciousness of her empathy.

Until recently, I rarely used the word “love” with my students. I had avoided it for the same reason that I hesitate to hug them, but it appeared without forethought one afternoon, when Anabel’s counsellor took her for a therapy session out of the classroom. We love Anabel, I told my class, and we have so many ways of showing it. It felt good to use this word. It felt authentic and it felt right. I began to say it more frequently and her friends did, too.

It would be misguidedly optimistic to say that love alone will resolve Anabel’s grief or end the cycles of violence that are perpetuated by systemic racism and intergenerational financial poverty. But maybe there is something quietly radical in speaking love into existence at school and making it acceptable for my students to love each other wholly, unromantically and unselfconsciously.

Love across the virtual void

Within a few weeks of burying her brother, Anabel began to cry less and laugh more in class. She continued to make progress in reading, writing and math. She also began to understand that there are people in this world who have used their hands for something other than giving hugs and pats on the back.

As I grapple with the various challenges and impositions of this current school year, I think about Anabel and the countless other children like her. So much of what I’ve described took place inside her personal space: squishing together with her friends on the rug, sitting closely by a teacher to read a book. To my knowledge, no education researcher has ever studied what would happen if teachers lost the use of proximity as a pedagogical and therapeutic tool.

Could a child experiencing trauma - or, really, any child - feel love through the physical barrier of a screen or across a chasm of 2 metres? What’s more, am I, as a teacher, truly capable of caring as much about the disembodied and easily muted heads on a Zoom grid as I do about the flesh-and-blood human beings who normally share my classroom? Can young children acknowledge their virtual classmates as real people with real emotions, and not just as little avatars on their laptops? I honestly don’t yet know.

Josh Benjamin teaches first grade in Boston, Massachusetts

This article originally appeared in the 16 October 2020 issue under the headline “‘They’ve gone to live on a farm’”