Frog

I might have seemed okay over the past couple of days to those who’ve seen me from a distance, but I haven’t been. My teacher has died, and I’m sad.

You might think to yourself, “Sarah surely had dozens of teachers,” and that’s quantitatively true. But Andy Lowe was my real one, and I’m hurting as I begin to process his passing at 66 from cancer-of-the-everything, which he fought and survived, and then didn’t.

Feeling used, readers? Used as a sounding board for the beginning stages of grief? Well, get used to it, as you should be already if you love to read as much as I do, as Andy taught me to. Most of what we read emerged from the grief of whoever wrote it. Even the most fantastical fiction includes glimmers of the author’s search for catharsis as they reluctantly accept that what they had — whatever it was — is gone. The world had Andy. Andy is gone. Allow me to talk about him.

Andy was my history teacher, swim coach, advisor, mentor, friend-of-the family, harshest critic, and biggest fan. The sheer quantity of what I remember about his words and our time together would probably have blown him away. The influence he had on me was all the more profound in that he believed in me. Me! I had bad skin, skinny legs, untamable eyebrows, and no idea when to shut up. Out of mercy or relentless humanism, he took me seriously and required I do the same. He was the first person outside my family who made me feel like something other than “conscientious” and “outgoing.” For a young woman, you have to understand: that was huge.

I used a dumb idiomatic expression I can’t now remember. Andy stopped me, told me to pick better words, because I was above dumb idiomatic expressions. Was I? Well, Andy said so.

I had a hissy fit after swimming poorly at an important tournament Senior year. He followed me into the locker room and told me to get it together, as I needed to act like a leader. I did.

He worked with groups of students in the summer on reading texts around which no high school student — nor most college students — could wrap their heads. I read Crime and Punishment while working the grill at the town pool’s snack bar. I figured out that if you translate the Russian names into an English-language mnemonic (Raskolnikov becomes Rusty), the reading’s smoother. Then, on a trip Andy led to St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, I and two others who’d been in this book group went to visit Rusty’s address. That which was previously in two dimensions became alive in three, and everything changed.

On the same trip, I experienced the call from God that landed me in Christian ministry. Andy took us to a churchyard outside Moscow — Zagorsk — and I had a conversion experience. I don’t think it could have happened had my heart and mind not been opened already by a teacher, one who didn’t dish out compliments, seeing something in me one could call potential. That Andy was a profoundly secular person, yet has a direct tie to my giving over my life to sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, surely means something I don’t yet understand.

When I was 14, Andy paid my sister and me to help him paint his apartment. He told us while we painted that he’d never get married, as the institution was too restrictive. We then watched Andy fall in love with Andrea, get married in a church with a smile that lit up his whole countenance, and then listened to him wax on about each of his three kids as they entered and made their way in the world. In a way, we all grew up together.

Andy called me Frog because my breast stroke kick was all wrong until he fixed it (you don’t flay; you whip). He was still calling me Frog when he was sick, and I was over 50 years old.

There will never be another like Andy, so here’s all I can do, not to replace, but to honor: I’ll take the advice he gave me when I graduated from the school where he taught me: “Read like crazy.”

I’ll try to demonstrate to the students I teach now that I believe in them and expect more of them than they might even expect from themselves. I’ll stick with people over the course of their lives, as duration and transcending various eras matters. And as much as I’ll respect Andy’s secular-humanist ways, I’ll cling to God’s promise that, although we don’t understand how it could be, death never wins; life does. Every time.