This piece was written by Bishop Maginn High School Senior Katharine Lewis, one of the bright lights in my Writing Workshop at the school. We are hoping to publish a book called “Interrupted Lives,” the story from the inside of the school’s closing and the affect in had on student lives, graduation.

We hear a lot about what is or isn’t best for kids, but we rarely hear from them in their own voices. This writing exerience is all about voice. Chapter Two: What Was Lost,  it is a piercing and honest look at what the school’s closing has meant to Katie and her expectations for the next chapter in her life.

In this chapter, she alwo writes about losing her beloved dog Teddy (Katie is a passionate animal lover, she helped train Zinnia for therapy work) in the midst of the coronavirus shutdown.  I am lucky to be working with these wonderful young writers:

“What I Lost When School Closed:” By Katherine Lewis. 

I think my biggest loss from our school closing has been time.  It may be hard to understand what I mean by that. I don’t mean time as it is on a clock, I mean time together.  The kind of time I mean is memories; moments shared.

    The biggest gift we have is our time, the memories we make are the most valuable things we have and are very difficult to make from six feet apart.  I am at a point in my life where I am coming to an end of yet another transitional period.

 I am about to be a senior, as you may already know, many of my friends are graduating this year so I will not see them much anymore.  This part of the school year is when we should be doing fun activities, we should be tie-dyeing and working in the community garden.

This is supposed to be a fun time to move up to senior year.  A time to say goodbye to a critical passage in my life – high school.

    I should be having my junior ring ceremony and be enjoying the end of my junior year.  I should be in lunch with my friends cracking stupid jokes about something that happened earlier in the day.

I even miss my teachers and the class activities we did.  High school is so short to begin with and now my third year is practically over and I did not get to enjoy the feeling of being on the edge of senior year, or making those final memories with my friends.

Quite a few people in my family went to Maginn, they all had these experiences and still remember them fondly, I will never get to look back on this time that way.

 I shouldn’t be at home right now but Covid doesn’t care.  The virus is not going to stop just because we want to get back to normal, we are sacrificing these things for a reason, to regain the ability to safely enjoy the things that are important to us.

    I have a close relationship with my grandparents, I visit them quite often.  I haven’t really been able to see them at all since this started.  To go from spending a lot of time around them to practically none is a hard adjustment.  Easter break this year was the first school break in my entire life that I did not go over to spend time with them.

It was difficult to know I was on a school break and would not be waking up early to go out to breakfast on my way to their house.

    There are so many little things that make up my life that I never really considered as important until I had to go without them like I do now.  I have never had to go without visiting family or seeing my friends, or enjoying my time in school.  Never before have I had this amount of time to really sort out what was important to me and I have never had to miss those things like I do now.

    I’ve learned that there have also been positive experiences, spending more time with my immediate family, having more time with my pets and for my hobbies outside of school, but there is a lot I have been forced to miss out on, some things that can be made up, but others I will never get back.

    My dog, Teddy, was a 12 year old german shepherd and was my baby.  I had him since I was in kindergarten; we grew up together, for every milestone in my life, he was with me.

I loved him more than anything.  As my family and I have had to spend more time at home, we realized his back legs were giving out, he was stumbling and falling just walking to get outside.  We found out after a few weeks that he had degenerative myelopathy and we had to make the tough decision to euthanize him.

    Not only did I lose my dog but I lost the chance to stay with him until the end.  Our vet told us a few days before we made the appointment that if things got to that point, only one of us could be with him.

   As a minor, that was not going to be me.  If it weren’t for Covid, I could have gone in and spent his last moments with him.  This is something I will never get back.

    Nothing can replace or substitute that, I can’t help but feel like I made him go through that scared and wondering where I was.

I will never get to sit with him again, share popcorn while watching a movie, or go on our walking loop.  He will never sleep by my bed or protect me from the mailman, he won’t sit with me at dinner or bring me his stuffed penguin to play fetch in the morning again.

Losing a pet is never easy but not having the choice to be with them until the very end is worse.  It would be better if it was my choice, if I had decided not to go but the virus took my right to choose to be there away.

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My notes: Katie, glad to see you open up here, and show more feeling. I applaud you ability to be honest and clear and thoughtful, all at the same time. This will make a wonderful chapter in our book, and thanks. I’m sorry about Teddy.

P.S. I am working to support Principal Mike Tolan’s effort to consturct a new kind of graduation for the Bishop Maginn Seniors. We (the Army Of Good) has already purchase customized baseball caps and special graduation pins so the students will be able to mark graduation in some visible way.

Those items cost $900.

If you wish to support this new kind of graduation, you can contribute via Paypal, [email protected] or by check, Jon Katz, Graduation Support, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. Thanks.