Sue Chanson, the High Priestess of the Painful Truth
âI'm glad you're going to keep teaching. I was worried you'd do something tasteless, like become a lawyer or write porn.â
Though she knew I was too lazy to take the LSAT â when, in As I Lay Dying, Anse Bundren, desperate to avoid physical labor, swears that were he to sweat heâd die, Mrs. Chanson stared pointedly at me over her book â Mrs. Chanson also knew that writing dime-store paperback smut is an enterprise situated perfectly in the sweet spot of my desire both to do nothing at all and to be paid princely sums. More importantly and somehow less judgmentally, Mrs. Chanson was, given our countless teary phone calls, all too familiar with the number of times Iâd inched toward the precipice of a teacher burn-out. Maybe this is a trauma-informed response from my year spent in the captivity of her red pen, but I took Mrs. Chansonâs words â spoken and heard over (a lot of) wine one spring â as heartfelt affirmation: that I was doing just fine, that I could and should keep going.
I remember my first distress call: I was three years older than my students and I had made a mess of my unit on Nathaniel Hawthorneâs The Scarlet Letter. And so I was doing what seemed the most natural thing to do: hiding in the faculty restroom and disrupting the quiet retirement of my AP English Language teacher, my finger nervously tapping a strand of my dead dogâs hair, which Iâd found stuck beneath the case and had scotch-taped to the back of my phone.
Mrs. Chanson was no stranger to coaching teachers â over the course of four decades, she had hired and mentored every single English teacher at Porter-Gaud â and, as I tried to explain the depth and precise topography of the hole Iâd dug myself into, she patiently listened. Afraid sheâd take apart my teaching the way sheâd once pithed my pitiful paper on Darl and Jewel, I anxiously listened as she sighed and got out of her chair to look at the calendar â and then proceeded to plot out The Scarlet Letter for me, day-by-day, class-by-class, and tell me where I could fit the remaining writing assignments.
She told me to relax, wash my face, and stop pacing in front of a toilet with a motion-sensor-activated, industrial-strength flush that I kept setting off. Before we said goodbye, she read me an interesting paragraph from the book Iâd interrupted â a history of the Romantics and science by Richard Holmes â and told me to keep my head up because I could do it.
I would be a lucky man if I could do it even half as well as she did.
Standing in front of the board, her rings and bracelets constantly tapping against the wood of the lectern as she leaned forward with the momentum of a giggle or an acerbic rejoinder, Mrs. Chanson seemed to whistle when she spoke, invited us to look until we saw, and picked through our thoughts like a thrifter, looking for something of value and discarding the rest. Not content to have such ruthless sharpness remain metaphorical, she prowled the Green before commencement with a pair of scissors in pursuit of seersucker jackets with still-threaded vents: âYour mother doesnât really care about you if she let you out of the house like this.â
Informed, no doubt, by her years in the trenches as one of Porter-Gaudâs only female teachers â responsible, in those days before coeducation, for hordes of Charlestonâs boys, a particularly rowdy one of whom Mrs. Chanson informed: âHoney, Iâm the first in a long line of women who will teach you things you donât know.â â Mrs. Chansonâs American literature curriculum challenged us to question our definitions of masculinity, of America, of love. Her handwritten âguideâ to Ernest Hemingwayâs works, for instance, which I keep in my bottom left drawer at work, cautions: âH first used war & hunting to show men behaving in grace & dignity in face of certain defeat â degenerated to merely occasions for masculine display & triumph.â Not content with the textbookâs paltry selection of female writers, Mrs. Chanson supplemented our readings with handout after handout, with Annie Dillardâs nature writings and excerpts from Clara Bartonâs journals, with Sylvia Plathâs and Elizabeth Bishopâs reflective, spiraling poems. We spent weeks reading Henry David Thoreau alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. â her neat cursive, words truncated as if in a telegram, fills the margins with annotations about Martin Buber and St. Augustine, explanations of Newtonâs mechanistic determinism and Marxâs historical lenses â to trace a long arc of civic engagement, Constitutional shortcomings, and civil disobedience.
She set out to teach us that nothing was unworthy of study and that no one was beneath notice â and she loved her work. Thatâs in part what made her volcanically angry whenever, following an absence, we dared to ask: âDid I miss anything?â Most strikingly â in a moment that made apparent the cosmic reality that Porter-Gaud was not heliocentric but Sue-centric â Mrs. Chanson browbeat a short-tenured former headmaster, a trained geologist, who had a habit of roving in and out of classrooms, jingling keys and attempting, in a jocular manner, to curry favor with students with his eye-rolling in the presence of our standard fare â the teaching of literature â which he dismissed as arcane. Without knocking, he took five full strides into the sanctum of the High Priestess â we were busy writing essays that would shortly be eviscerated in that same neat cursive â before sniffing at and bemoaning our focus on poetry and asking Mrs. Chanson if she planned on teaching anything âinterestingâ that day.
An administrative species accustomed to non-Darwinian deference, this former headmaster was about as well equipped for what ensued as a Dodo was for a Dutchman: âYes. Iâm going to strip naked and light myself on fire. Every day is interesting in English class. Why donât you go play with your rocks? Shut the door behind you.â
With the door shut, we talked about love â its types, forms, and counterfeits. Her eyes glistened as she read to us about Dimmesdaleâs moonlit courage: âThe minister felt for the childâs other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.â She joked about the deprivation and desperation of Faulknerâs Miss Emily Grierson, who pitifully mistakes something else entirely for love â âThough you know,â quipped Mrs. Chanson, âyou always want to remember your first time.â She made us interrogate what or whom Gatsby loved, implored us to consider the complicated push-and-pull of Tom Wingfieldâs love, invited us to write in the style of Whitman and look inward with love.
And then, one December morning, Peter hanged himself.
In his diary, Leonard Woolf attempted to write through his grief following Virginia Woolfâs death by drowning: âIt is a strange fact,â he writes, âthat a terrible pain in the heart can be interrupted by a little pain in the fourth toe of the right foot. I know that she will not come across the garden from the lodge, and yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned and yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page and yet I turn it over. There is no limit to oneâs stupidity and selfishness.â
Peterâs desk, near Mrs. Chansonâs own, was left unoccupied and untouched in our classroom â and each day that it remained that way served as a reminder of his absence.Â
On some days, we wanted nothing more than to busy ourselves with reading and writing â to work around the absence in such a normal sort of way that loss might somehow fade from sight.Â
On other days, we found that the empty chair was so loud that we could not hear ourselves read â and the mere idea of writing felt profane. How, when the entire world was off-balance, could âthe dogs go on with their doggy life,â as Auden writes, and our student lives proceed as usual?
And on no day did any two people in the room align regarding how grief would or should take shape. Thus, the crosscurrents of different griefs swirled around us, creating pain and tension where there should have been consolation. None of us, Mrs. Chanson knew, could find words for anything; indeed, very few of us were prepared even to listen to ourselves or to others.
Then one class, in her softly whistling voice, Mrs. Chanson read Robert Frost to us: âDonât â donât go,â the husband begs Amy in âHome Burial.â âDonât carry it to someone else this time. / Tell me about it if itâs something human. / Let me into your grief.â But she turns to go anyway; frustrated that each attempt to talk pushes his wife further away, he exclaims: âAnd itâs come to this, / A man canât speak of his own child thatâs dead.â
âYou canât,â Amy responds, âbecause you donât know how to speak.â
Striving to give us words and ways of understanding so that we could speak and, more importantly, listen, Mrs. Chanson preached the power of patience: patience with others, patience with ourselves, patience that, though at first bitter, might engender empathy and insight.
Most days, I smilingly remember the homilies of the High Priestess of the Painful Truth as concerning improper citations, comma splices, or half-baked arguments â and the pain, accordingly, as something felt most acutely when report cards arrived in the mail. But what we learned that day, listening to Mrs. Chanson fight through tears and Frost, was the most painful truth of all.
Mrs. Chanson died this week, and I again found myself hiding in the faculty bathroom. Washing my face before going back to class, I thought about reading Anna Karenina with her the summer before my senior year. Of all the beautiful passages in the book, she alighted on a paragraph toward the end, when Levin sees his child for the first time â and the baby sneezes: âWhat he felt for this small being was not at all what he had expected,â Tolstoy writes. âThere was nothing happy or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, there was a new tormenting fear. It was an awareness that he had become vulnerable in a new way. And this awareness was so tormenting at first, the fear lest this helpless being should suffer was so strong, that because of it he scarcely noticed the strange feeling of senseless joy and even pride he had experienced when the baby sneezed.â
Thatâs the painful truth the High Priestess taught us. Love is not just butterflies and daydreams, not just your first time or some grand revelation. The painful truth is that love does not and cannot exist without vulnerability and loss, that grief is an expression and manifestation of love, that to love truly is to expose yourself to a world of indescribable joy and unbearable sorrow.
Loving Mrs. Chanson means missing her for a long, long time â and thatâs the painful truth in all its beauty.
SueChan, fittingly on the far left















