Sharon Steiff z"l |
I visited Ms. Steiff in the hospital on the first day of Rosh Hashanah this past year. I was a student in Ms. Steiff's English class at the Maimonides School. She and I would sometimes exchange playful banter in the hallway as she carried her trademark cup of steaming hot coffee from the teacher's lounge down the high school corridor to room 3 where she would introduce us to playwrights and poets like Thornton Wilder and Edgar Allen Poe, to the rules of grammar, often chastising us for a paper riddled with too many misplaced commas, and vocabulary words that sometimes twisted the tongue with the unfamiliar paring of consonants and vowels.
Visiting her in the hospital on this first day of Rosh Hashanah, 12 years after learning the rules of grammar, the writing style of different authors, and those vocabulary words that would be recalled a few years later on the SAT, I came to know Sharon Steiff for the first time.
She seemed to be reinvigorated when I walked into the room, pleased to have company on the Holiday. She clutched a Rosh Hashanah prayer book in her hand, with post-it notes marking the priority of the High Holiday prayers to be recited if she had the strength. I spoke through the surgical mask that I was instructed to wear, and that covered half my face. We started talking as familiar as old friends. She told me she looked terrible, and I said she looked beautiful. She smiled and laughed, but not before her cheek blushed with a hint of color from the compliment. We talked for hours, and as time passed and our conversation became more excited, she became more animated. She sat forward in her hospital bed and rocked excitedly as we talked about all the things a teacher and student never talk about. We talked about love and dating, music, theater, travel, and our mutual love for opera. We talked about what we were each looking for in spouses, and she suggested former students who she could set me up with. I told her about a girl in New York I wanted to date, and she confided in me about a man she was interested in, swearing me to secrecy like the high school girls she taught would make their best friends do. We talked about all those years ago when I sat in the front left corner of her classroom not because I could pay the most attention there, but because it was the closest seat to the door when the 42 minute period was over. We laughed over the vocabulary words we used to make fun of like "ragamuffin", which sounded like something you had with eggs and toast for breakfast, and "hyperbole", which we used to joke sounded like a football game when pronounced phonetically. She told me that her favorite students were the mischievous boys who had "that spark of trouble" in their eyes. "I had to be stern with them" she said to me. "I couldn't smile though I really wanted to. But they were my favorites they were so alive".
We talked about the stories she introduced to us, and that I still pull off the bookshelf to read every now and then when I am in the mood for a short fiction: "The Most Dangerous Game", "The Tell Tale Heart", and "The Lottery" But there is one play I read in her class that strikes a particularly poignant chord today. I have not read the play since Ms. Steiff's class 12 years ago, and I just bought a copy of it to reread. It is the famous three act play authored by Thornton Wilder, "Our Town". Here is an excerpt from the end of the first act:
Rebecca:
I never told you about the letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.
George:
Whats funny about that?
Rebecca:
But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America: Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe, the Mind of God - that's what it said on the envelope.
I distinctly remember the conversation we had in class after reading this excerpt. Ms. Steiff explained that the purpose of this exchange was to highlight the insignificance of the individual the relative nature of an individual as an insignificant speck in the tremendous scope of all creation.
I cherish those several hours I spent with Ms. Steiff on Rosh Hashanah. And as I reflect on the effect she had on my development, I know that her influence was significant, indeed. Over the course of more than 20 years as a teacher, Ms. Steiff was an influence on thousands of young minds on which she left lasting impressions. Sometimes students do not truly appreciate a teacher until they have the advantage of a decade worth of hindsight.
In a phone conversation a few weeks after my visit, Ms. Steiff spoke with unsettling honesty about her condition and the bone marrow transplant she was about to undergo a week later. "I don't know if this is going to work for me" she said, "but if from all the people who came out to be tested for me, one of them can save someone else in the future maybe that 4 year old girl in Israel who needs a transplant if I don't survive but my struggle to survive means that someone else will live, then I consider my life a success".
I know this to be true today: Sharon Steiff, of Brookline; Middlesex County; Massachusetts; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God, lived an extraordinarily significant and meaningful life. She will be missed dearly by all who knew her, and were influenced by her.
May Sharon's family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
Copyright 2004 Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation www.giftoflife.org
