Come See Me Before You Go by Karen Wilfrid

He was my favorite student. 

Most people, when I tell them that, assume I mean it figuratively—that he was special, a kid I liked a lot—because teachers aren’t supposed to have a literal favorite. But Tyler was mine. I found it comforting, that first year of teaching, to have this one, private failure amid so many public ones: lesson flops, classroom management nightmares, papers piling up ungraded. I had a favorite, and no one would have guessed it was him.

I can still picture Tyler exactly as he was twelve years ago. His brown hair fell long into his eyes with the kind of minimally groomed indifference only a seventh-grade boy can manage; he wore a blue Under Armour hoodie with neon orange lining. He sat slouched at his desk, his brow furrowed in an imperturbable pout. 

Before I became a teacher, I’d imagined the students I would connect with the most would be the kind I had been: diligent, earnest, shy—the kind who lingered after class in hopes of a private conversation or an affirming word. Tyler wasn’t like that. In fact, he took pride in pushing me away. Every day, Tyler raised his hand straight in the air and waited; every day, I hesitated, and then, driven by delusional optimism that this time might be different, I’d call on him. “So, what you’re saying is…” he would begin, and then proceed to mock or contradict whatever I’d just said. He would lean back with a triumphant smirk, while the rest of the class laughed, or groaned—and I would be left wondering why I was such a sucker.    

Sometimes he actually had a point; other times he just seemed cynical, or even mean. He was smart and read voraciously, but his work was sloppy and late. The math teacher described him as “on the fringes.” Each day, he was the first to leave, slipping past me and rocketing away.

I was a new teacher, in a profession I deeply wanted and was desperate to do right—but I was also shy and still lacking the conviction that a room full of twelve-year-olds had any reason to listen to me. Tyler’s daily remarks made my already tenuous grip on this whole operation even more unsteady. “Well, this will be fun,” he said one afternoon about the activity we were about to begin, and I knew we needed to have a talk. 

At the end of class, as he attempted to shoot past, I called after him. This was the first time I’d had a private hallway conversation with any student. Tyler, on the other hand, seemed familiar with the procedure. He trudged back to the doorway where I stood waiting for him.

That fall, Tyler was already as tall as I was; by spring, he would be taller. I faced him, prepared to deliver some stern words that had not yet taken shape in my mind—and his eyes met mine. They were pale blue, staring back at me with an openness that sent a jolt to my heart. It wasn’t just his eyes; his face, his entire comportment had changed. I had expected to see the closed-off, sulking kid I was used to. Instead, I saw gentleness there. I saw vulnerability.

This is a good kid, a voice said clearly in my mind.

I have no recollection of what I said to him. I doubt he was even impacted by the conversation. But I was. From then on, whenever Tyler blurted out a sarcastic remark, or scowled through lunch detention, or gave an exaggerated, “What,” when I called after him at the end of class—I remembered the boy I had seen when I looked into his eyes. I wanted to see that boy again and again. And even though it wasn’t at all like the eager relationship I’d once had with my own teachers, that boy, Tyler, was the student who—gradually, astonishingly—opened up to me.

This is a good kid, a voice said clearly in my mind.

Five years later, I attended his graduation. In the crowd milling around outside after the ceremony, I hugged him and told him how proud I was. His mom took a picture: My hair looks flat in the light evening drizzle, and I’m holding my rain jacket bunched under one arm, but Tyler is beaming in his shiny blue gown. 

It all felt like a story to me—Tyler’s story, with my role in it that began the moment we met each other’s eyes outside my classroom door. Wasn’t that the essence of a teacher’s job: to play a part, however large or small, in the myriad of stories unfolding before us? “I’m sure there will be more to the Tyler story,” I wrote in my journal that first year. “I just hope, and wish, it will have a happy ending. I think it will.”

I was wrong. In March of 2021, I found out that Tyler had died.

---

The call came on a Sunday. I had just finished writing a difficult scene in my novel, and I was reading it through again, feeling satisfied with the wording I’d chosen, when my phone rang beside me.

It was Tyler’s mom, Michelle. Over the years, we’d become close, first through phone conversations about Tyler’s progress in seventh grade, then reconnecting years later when she took a job in my school’s library. We used to eat lunch together in the dank, windowless office behind the circulation desk, and she would keep me updated on Tyler and his younger brother, whom I’d also taught. We’d stayed in touch after Tyler graduated and the family moved back to Ohio. I received periodic updates about how Tyler was doing in college: He had a 3.7 GPA. He had joined ROTC. He had a girlfriend. Michelle once texted me a picture of the contents of his dorm room desk: a jar of peanuts, an opened packet of Big Red chewing gum, and the copy I’d given him of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I was glad to see her calling.

She sounded different—her voice higher, wavering—but I dismissed it, and when she asked if I had time to talk, I gave an enthusiastic yes.

She hesitated. “The reason I’m calling is not a good one,” she said.

My body understood before my mind could. When she said the words, I felt it through every capillary. My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t think, and I found myself grabbing absurdly for pen and paper, as if taking notes would help, as if I could make sense of it all later the way I once had when I used to call Michelle from my classroom phone. I would tell her how Tyler was doing, and what I planned to do next; she would thank me and tell me what a special teacher I was. Sometimes I would call when I didn’t really need to, just so I could hear that affirmation again, so I could hear her say that I was making a difference for him. 

That’s what she was saying now, too, though I was only half hearing it. She said Tyler would have wanted me to know how much I’d meant to him; he’d just been talking about me the other day. The one teacher he cared about was what I managed to copy down on my notepad, in scratchy blue from a pen whose ink refused to flow.

I said something then. What did I say? 

She was crying, then apologizing for crying. I couldn’t imagine how she’d had the strength to call me at all.

Later, I sat on the living room floor, shaking, my knees drawn to my chest. “He was my favorite student,” I said incredulously to my husband, as he cried with me. In those first hours, I couldn’t get past the probability. I had taught almost a thousand students. How could this have happened to the one who left the first, most indelible mark on my heart?

“I just have this awful feeling…” I couldn’t finish the thought. Had Tyler taken his life? In a noticeable omission that neither of us acknowledged, Michelle hadn’t told me how he had died. I understood what that meant.

A few hours later, I took a deep breath and searched for his name online. There, in his college’s news report, were all the awful words you hear: Found. Dorm room. Unresponsive. Coroner. No foul play. All the awful words, but about Tyler. My Tyler. Tyler whose poem “I Stand There” still hung on the wall above my desk in my classroom. He was twenty-one years old.

Tyler, I wrote that night, tears streaming. Did it matter, all that time I spent worrying about you and caring about you and chasing you down to get your stupid homework?

Didn’t you know how much I would cry for you?

Why didn’t you come see me?

---

I remember the first time Tyler smiled at me. 

He was working, reluctantly, in my room after school, catching up on missing work and griping as I waited for him to fill in his assignment notebook for the evening. “Why do I need to write it down?” he groused. “I’ll just remember it.”

“How has that been working for you so far?” I asked. I’d found that dishing out a little snark of my own sometimes worked with him.

Tyler conceded: “Not great.” He returned to work, and I craned my neck to oversee. In a cluster of five desks, he always kept one between us, never sitting directly across from or beside me. I had no other student who did this.

Another boy, Tyler’s neighbor, was in the room with us—a cheerful, exuberant kid who reveled in my attention. Having finished his homework, he was using the remaining after-school time to spin around in circles.

“Whoa,” he finally said, stopping as he collided with a desk. “I’m dizzy.”

“I bet,” I said indulgently, and, in one of my more unprofessional moments, I shot Tyler a smiling eyeroll. 

Tyler smiled back—bashful. Pleased at the shared confidence. He quickly dropped his eyes back to his paper.

“A deep mistrust of teachers,” his mom had called it one of the first times we’d spoken on the phone. Over time, she shared with me some of the experiences that had led him to build up his defenses: the first-grade teacher who had publicly shamed him for using his middle finger to point to the board before he’d known what middle fingers meant; the third-grade teacher who had called him a liar when he’d said he was reading Harry Potter. Michelle said it was like an armor, this thing that stood between Tyler’s true self and the rest of us. 

Sometimes I could see behind the armor. Every once in a while, when Tyler made a genuine comment, his classmates would laugh, thinking it was more of his attitude. I could see his shock and disappointment then at being misunderstood. I remember walking past him on one of those days as he sulked at his desk, head down. I caught the powdery scent of his family’s laundry detergent, which so sweetly undermined his surly exterior, and I wondered at how much hurt and sensitivity this one boy tried to hide. It radiated from him. It made me feel the same, terrifying tenderness I’d once felt when I worked at a daycare—when the infants would fall asleep in my arms, relaxing into me, entrusting everything to me. Oh, crap, I would think, feeling the awesomeness of the task. I do not want to mess this up.  

---

Was it normal to feel this way after losing a student? I wasn’t sure: Here was another teaching milestone, albeit one I never wanted, that I was experiencing first with Tyler. Tyler, I thought, trying to make myself understand. I wouldn’t see pictures of his college graduation. I wouldn’t attend his wedding, a fantasy I’d once idly entertained. Because of COVID, I couldn’t even attend his funeral. 

I looked back at old journal entries, e-mails back and forth with Michelle, the card he sent me when he graduated eighth grade a year after I taught him, Sorry I never visited. I felt as though I was piecing together a puzzle—one I’d found dashed to the floor after I’d thought I was done. The puzzle came together differently now. All my fond moments with Tyler, all the small, tender triumphs—what had they mattered, if the end of it was this? 

Was it normal to feel this way after losing a student?

“We’re just planting seeds,” the science teacher used to say during the year we taught Tyler together. “That’s the most we can do.” In the weeks after Tyler’s death, I thought of these words. I realized I had been understanding them wrong. In the science teacher’s metaphor, our students were a garden; we were cultivating seeds within them, hoping that what we taught would take root. What I had always imagined was that my students were the seeds—tender shoots by the time we received them—which we nurtured the best we could before passing them along. “We’re just planting seeds, but I want the full-grown tree,” I wrote in my journal one night after Tyler had sulked through my entire class and only lifted a pencil to doodle on the handout. “Or, I would settle for a sturdy sapling. Right now I think I’ve got a twig stuck in the dirt.” Part of what I thought I had learned from Tyler, after a year with him, was to trust in that full-grown tree even though I might never see it. 

Now, though, everything I believed had been shaken. What did it mean if the student I sweated for, wept for, prayed for, poured my heart into—what did it mean if he didn’t want to go on living? If his story was over, if the tree I had watched and nurtured was suddenly pulled up at the roots, then what had been my role in it? I’d always thought that one day, when I was an old-lady teacher on the brink of retirement, I would look up and see him standing there in my doorway. Any chance I’d ever had, I’d tried to tell him how special he was to me, in the ways that teachers can: graduation cards, a few precious e-mails when he’d asked me for a job reference. I had told him—but had he known? 

How could he, if he had done this?

One afternoon, Tyler arrived late to my class with a pass from the office and no further explanation. While I taught assonance and slant rhyme, he barely lifted his head. No snark. When the bell rang for the end of the school day, I managed to stop him on his way out the door.

“Walk with me,” I said, and to my surprise, he did.

I asked him why he’d been late.

“I was in the office,” he said evasively.

“Did something happen?” 

It was as if I had opened the floodgates. “Okay,” he launched in. “So I tased David…” 

Tasing, a prank making its way through our hallways and buses, meant poking someone hard just beneath the ribs; I’d had to break up some playful tasing on our recent field trip. Tyler had done it in this same, obnoxious spirit—not knowing, he said, that David, who walked with a limp and whose mom was dead, had just been in the hospital the day before. I had to admit, it was bad. “I already called my mom,” he finished, as if wanting me to know that everything had been thoroughly handled. “I have a detention.”

I’ll never know where my nerve or directness came from to ask, “Were you upset?”

He sputtered at the absurdity of my question. “Yeah, I was upset!” he exclaimed. “I’m not—” His voice broke, but he covered it quickly. “I’m a good person,” he said. “I wouldn’t hurt someone on purpose.”

My heart broke for him. I thought of him in the office, calling his mom to share his disgrace, and I wondered, Who had been there for him? “I know you’re a good person, Tyler,” I said. “You’re a great person.”

He smiled, his usual bravado, the armor, swiftly back in place. “I am a great person.”

“I really mean it,” I said.

We had stopped where we were in the hallway, at the junction where I would go one way back to my classroom and he would go the other to his locker. The crowds flowed past us on either side, but Tyler stayed with me. As we’d walked, he’d even leaned into me a little bit so we wouldn’t get separated—this boy who previously couldn’t even sit across from me.

“Thanks,” he said. Each fall, I look out into the classroom and wonder which student will be like Tyler. Of course, no student is really like him. But when I meet their eyes, when I feel that tenderness toward them, I know what it means. It’s my blessing, and my curse: The kids I connect with the most, the ones I always miss, are also the least likely to come back. 

---

Tyler did come back, once, to visit me. When he was a junior in high school, he came to my classroom in jeans and a blue hoodie, smiling, and handed me a hot pink paper. 

“What is this?” I asked. Michelle had told me that he’d be stopping by, but I almost hadn’t believed her. In all the years since seventh grade, he’d never been back to visit. 

Now, here he was, telling me that the pink paper was a form signifying that I agreed to write his college recommendation letter.

I was speechless. I had dreamed of being able to write this letter. Who could write it more genuinely, more glowingly than me? “I am so excited about this,” I told him, holding up the signed paper before passing it back.

“It means a lot to me,” he said.

That summer, I began working on the letter. The gushing part was easy. “Few seventh-grade teachers are asked to write a college recommendation letter,” I began. “Fewer still are given the opportunity to write one for a student who has truly and personally touched their heart.” I hit a wall when it came to incorporating more current facts. Was it varsity soccer he played now? What had been the topic of his Junior Research Paper? Then there was the question of his grades, some of which, I knew, weren’t great. Should I address those? How? To omit mentioning them entirely would do him no service—and Tyler wouldn’t want me to sugarcoat, anyway. He wasn’t like that.

My final draft had a few blanks that I planned to fill in later, when school started again and I could ask him—but before I had the chance, Michelle reached out to tell me that the Common Application, the form students use to apply to colleges around the country, would only accept a letter from a high school teacher. As it turns out, no seventh-grade teachers are asked to write a college recommendation letter. 

At times I thought of polishing up the letter and sending it to him, but I never did. Why didn’t I? Did I think he wouldn’t want to read a page and a half about what a strong, loyal, smart, and funny young man he was?

Why didn’t I send it?

After he died, I thought of that, and all the other ways I could have reached out but hadn’t during the three years since he’d graduated from high school. I had his family’s phone number—why hadn’t I called? Why hadn’t I sent him a birthday card, or even a card for no reason? 

Of course, I knew why I hadn’t done those things. It was because of the shame I felt, as a teacher, for caring about one student this much. In a 2016 opinion piece for the New York Times, Carol Hay points out that our society “lacks a script” for the relationship between female teacher and male student. “There is no female equivalent for ‘avuncular,’” Hay writes. In the weeks and months after Tyler’s death, I felt this distinct lack of vocabulary for what we had shared. How could I describe the depth of my loss? “He was like…” I would begin, and try to finish the sentence. A nephew? A godson? Those weren’t right. He had been those things to others, but not to me. “Favorite student” was as close as I could get.

You’re the only one, Michelle used to tell me, that first year and all the years after. The only teacher who had really connected with him. The only one who had made him think he could be different in school. Whenever he had struggled, Michelle and her husband would say to him, “Remember the people who have faith in you—like Ms. Wilfrid.” It made me feel magical, powerful. This was a welcome departure from the way I typically felt about myself as a teacher, which was that I wasn’t good enough. Even several years into my career, I looked around and saw that other teachers were more popular than I was, more outgoing, and just overall seemed not to doubt themselves as much as I did, which could only mean they were better suited for the job. In this way, any hope or confidence that I gave to Tyler, he gave back to me in equal measure. Every rough day that I came home thinking I was a total crap teacher, I would remember Tyler, and I would think, “At least I did that right.”

Now, the words that had once been a source of such pride, You’re the only one, became a sign of my failure. So much of my understanding of myself as a teacher, my worthiness, had grown from my conviction that Tyler was okay. Now, it turned out, he hadn’t been okay, presumably for a long time. And I hadn’t been there for him. Wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be?

One week after Tyler died, my principal asked if I would write a short paragraph about him to include in her e-mail when she notified staff. I knew his college recommendation letter had the words I was looking for. I cannot think of any other student who would come back to his seventh-grade teacher to ask for a letter; I cannot think of a student I would be prouder to write one for.

Once, I had told Tyler’s parents, “I would do anything for him.” I never imagined what that might mean.

I thought I couldn’t do it, but deep inside me, a voice shouted, You HAVE to do this. 

That voice screamed at me, pushing me to write through tears until I was done. 

People later told me how nice it was, how it honored him. Even Michelle told me it was beautiful. It wasn’t enough. The one person who deserved to read those words from me would never see them.

Why hadn’t I sent it?

After our conversation about the “tasing” incident, I saw Tyler changing. Now he would hang back a little at the end of class; at dismissal, he would poke his head in my door before he left and say he was “checking the clock.” I knew why he was really there. “Come see me before you go,” I used to tell him, wanting him to know that it mattered to me that I got to say goodbye to him each day. I was amazed at how something so simple could be so powerful. 

In early May, parents were invited to my classroom for “Poetry Day.” When Tyler stood to read his poem, my eyes found Michelle’s out in the audience, and we shared a secret smile. I had hoped to speak to her afterward, but she slipped out while I was talking to other parents.

“Did your mom already leave?” I asked Tyler, while his classmates busied themselves playing with balloons and promptly recycling the poems they’d worked so hard on.

“Yeah, I guess,” Tyler said. “Why—was there something you wanted me to tell her?”

I’d done enough fishing for compliments myself to recognize a fellow fisher. I was happy to bite. “Just that I’m proud of you. Can you tell her that?”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “I thought I was in trouble.”

He didn’t really think that. Tyler saw the change in himself, too—and the challenge. The poem he’d read was called “I Stand There”:

I stand at a crossroads

Two paths,

Labeled

Temptation

And kindness

I stand there,

Thinking

I stand there.

“What’s the opposite of ‘temptation’?” he had asked me as we’d worked on it after school. He’d tried to explain to me what he meant, ultimately settling on “kindness,” but he never could find the right word.

---

I’m not saying that I was a perfect teacher for Tyler. I was new. I messed up, lots of times, usually because I was pushing too hard about homework. I had the idea that if I could just understand why a smart, savvy kid would go home and not even try, not even start, then I could fix it. 

“What did you think we were doing today?” I asked him one afternoon, in a poor choice of words, when Tyler revealed that he had left all the materials for his writing project at home.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t go home and think about this class.”

Stupidly, selfishly, I was hurt. I go home and think about you.  

In June, on Field Day, I saw Tyler run. While I stood surrounded by seventh graders in school spirit-themed bandanas and face paint, already finished with their events and restless for the barbecue to come, the last leg of the relay race passed by. 

“YEAH, TYLER!” our team screamed.

We were behind. I watched Tyler as he powered forward, long-limbed, his face set in determination. It wasn’t enough, but he overtook two opponents before crossing the finish line. 

“Wow, Tyler,” I said when he came back to home base. “You’re fast.”

“Thanks,” he replied. 

After Tyler’s death, as I read other people’s obituaries and remembrances, I learned so much about him that I’d never known. He’d been majoring in international business. He liked to blast 90’s punk rock on his way to early-morning ROTC drills. He loved coffee. There was no way for me to have known these things before; it hadn’t been my place to know them. Still, I felt an acute sense of loss each time I learned something new—just as I felt when I first saw him run. I always wanted to be more to him than I ever could be.

In a strange twist, this was one of the hardest lessons I learned from Tyler: not to feel this way again. I learned the emotional distance that a teacher needs to maintain, even when it’s hard, even when I didn’t want to. I learned to build up my own armor. Never again would I be so persistent, never spend so many hours and tears, never have such a hard time letting go. With Tyler, though, it was too late, and maybe it had never been that much in my control. “God brought you into our lives,” Michelle used to say. While I didn’t feel like a heavenly gift, I did agree that I felt the influence of the divine. The moment when I looked into his eyes. The moment he appeared in my doorway in his blue hoodie, smiling, a young man. The moment I saw him in the crowd after his high school graduation, and he reached out to me for a hug. I never could explain the force of feeling I had for him. I still can’t. But I always knew it was real. 

And, somehow, I always knew that I would write about him.

Did I wonder what happened? Did I wonder how it happened—the horrible details? I did. Even though I knew I shouldn’t, even though I knew it would only bring me more pain to find out. I was ashamed for wondering, too. In an early conversation after Tyler’s passing, Michelle told me about acquaintances who would ask her directly: How did it happen? 

“You would never ask that if someone’s loved one died of cancer,” she said, her voice rising in pain. “You would never say, ‘What were the last thirty seconds of their life like?’ Pretty darn horrible, what do you think?!”

A few months after Tyler’s death, I listened to an episode of This American Life about a woman, a self-trained investigator and member of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation in North Dakota, who helps find missing people. One of the people who went missing, murdered, was her own niece. When asked why she was trying to find out the painful particulars of how her niece had been killed, she replied that she had made a promise to look out for her. She said, “I guess it was important for me to know how badly I failed at that.”

That’s exactly it, I thought. Tyler was the student I had said I would do anything for. How badly had I failed him?

If you have lost someone to suicide, then maybe you know this feeling. All the questions you ask yourself. All the questions others ask. Was he depressed? That’s what friends and acquaintances have asked me, but it’s not what they really mean. They mean: Could someone have known this was coming? If we think it could have been prevented, then we can soothe ourselves with the belief that we would have prevented it. It would not have happened to us.

Don’t tell yourself that. 

To this day, I don’t know how Tyler chose to end his life. I don’t think I’ll ever ask. Sometimes, though, I still get stuck thinking about it: Tyler, alone. His dorm room. Thirty seconds.

If you have lost someone to suicide, then maybe you know this feeling.

Why didn’t I send the letter? 

Why didn’t he come see me? 

Did he know how proud of I was of everything about him?

Ultimately, all of these are just another way of asking, What could I have done? 

Accepting that the answer is nothing is almost as hard as believing there may have been something. 

Once, when I was stuck in the loop of these thoughts, I thought I could hear him: Don’t do this, Ms. Wilfrid.

I wanted to listen to him. I try to.

---

On the last day of seventh grade, Tyler came to say goodbye to me.

It was late June, the latest school has ever run in the twelve years I’ve taught. I had been glad for it; I felt attached to my first batch of students and didn’t want to let them go. What barbaric job is this, I wondered, that forces you to have your heart ripped out year after year?

Most of all, I didn’t want to say goodbye to Tyler—but if we had to say goodbye, then I wanted it to be a good one. I had tried to orchestrate an opportunity for some parting words, asking him to come after school sometime during that last week of classes, but he’d been slippery, offering up a flimsy excuse and hurrying away. I knew not to push my luck. 

“Tyler isn’t good at goodbyes,” Michelle had told me. “Please don’t take it personally if he doesn’t come see you.”

I understood. But the following morning, after I dismissed my homeroom, I was shoving desks back in place and saw Tyler in my doorway.

“Tyler,” I smiled. I never got tired of saying his name. 

He was taller now than I was. His hair, which had fallen over his eyebrows for most of the year, was recently trimmed, making him look more open. 

I thanked him for coming. “You know I don’t have anything bad to say, right?”

“I know.” 

I handed him his final writing project, a short story that had earned a hard-won B+. “Yes!” he said, and gave a little fist pump. 

While he looked over my comments, I told him how proud I was of him. “You really made this year your own,” I said. “And you did it just—as Tyler.”

He thanked me. He was still looking down at his portfolio, nodding slowly.

“I’ll tell you this much,” he finally said. “You were the only teacher that actually taught anything.”

A compliment? Of course, in typical Tyler fashion, it was simultaneously a dig at my colleagues, but I would take what I could get. “Thank you,” I told him. “That means a lot, coming from you.”

He stared hard at his project. I waited. 

“You’re also the only teacher I’m going to miss,” Tyler said. He raised his head, and I looked into the blue eyes that I remembered from so many months ago. “I am actually going to miss you.”

I had no words. After so many times of my saying, “Tyler, wait,” and him saying, “What?”; after so many times calling him out for being snarky or stubborn or late; and after so many times watching him skirt by me to be the first one out the door…Tyler said he was actually going to miss me. And by “actually,” he’d meant truly.

My eyes burned with tears. “I am definitely going to miss you,” I told him.

By this time, I had made him very, very late for Spanish. I wrote him a pass, and I invited him to come back and visit me anytime next year.

“I will,” he said. 

He didn’t. 

Five years later, I would hug him goodbye at his high school graduation. It would be the last time I would see him.

I wish I’d had more time with Tyler. I wish I could have seen who he would have become. I wish I could have told him, over and over again, how special he was to me—how important he was to my own story. But as Tyler left my room that day, smiling, I thought, “What teacher could ask for more than this?”

It’s when I remember this moment, Tyler’s goodbye, that I can believe that I mattered to him, even if he departed this life earlier than I would have wished. He told me himself: The only one. Those were the best words he could find, just as later I would use the word “favorite” even though it wasn’t fully what I meant. What I meant, and what I later told him as I stood by the place where his ashes are, was that I loved him. That was what he meant to me. It mattered. He knew.

He was my favorite. I’d been his favorite, too.