Indeed. How well do we ever know the people we meet throughout our lives - our friends, our families, our colleagues, our neighbors, our acquaintances from church or chorus or book clubs, or even our spouses? I've been thinking about this a lot lately, since the death of my good friend, Tim Shannon.
I met Tim, Sean's technical theatre teacher, through the eyes of my son and his friends. After my son was killed in an accident during his senior year in high school, theatre teacher Tim could do no wrong in my mind. Tim let me come down to the high school often, buy pizza for his students during Hell Week, and really get to know what attracted my son to technical theatre in the first place, which had been Sean's passion in life. Technical theatre was what kept Sean from heading down a path of self-destruction in high school, providing a creative outlet for a bored teenager in the form of designing and building sets for high school plays.
And now, after knowing Tim only from the student perspective, I have had the chance to meet a few people from other parts of Tim's life. I have come to realize and understand that Tim was not the god-on-a-pedastal where I had placed him after my son died, but a human being, with faults. He had arguments with his wife, he had disagreements with his son, he probably left the toilet seat up. He mowed the lawn, took out the trash, and fed the dog. Mortal, as in vulnerable to the reach of the Grim Reaper's grasp. Mortal, just like the rest of us.
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