essay

Loving Unlovable People

It is not easy to love people when they’re lovable. It’s harder when they’re not. In high school, I learned intricate details of the battles of the Civil War. I knew my U.S. presidents frontwards and backwards. I could recite the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and William Faulkner’s remarks when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. I could wax poetic about the drafting of the U.S. Constitution: who was there, who wasn’t (women, for example, but don’t get me started).  

Why did I know so much about history?

Not because I was naturally predisposed to love studying bygone days, but because I had a brilliant young teacher who made the past exciting. Mr. Snow turned the whole school into a history project, with generals and kings and soldiers running through hallways, acne-prone battalions raging across the lunchroom, skirmishes reenacted in the band room and chemistry lab, gangly teens as Napoleon and foot soldiers. We had Patrick Henry’s liberty or death, “two if by sea” lanterns, and all that tea in the Boston Harbor.

We knew it all because Mr. Snow made it come alive with never a dull moment, nor a lesson that wasn’t experiential and active, with us moving through history, seeing it unfold, acting out our parts with hormonal gusto. He was an inventive and dazzling teacher, fresh from graduate school and bursting with ideas and staggering creativity in teaching a subject that in other, less capable hands is often soulless and pedestrian.

Many of us lose touch with our teachers, even brilliant ones significant to us. I don’t know where many of my high school teachers are, but I do know exactly where Mr. Snow is every moment of every day.

He is in prison for the rest of his life.

On December 16, 2002, Mr. Snow was convicted after facing hundreds of counts of first degree statutory sexual offense, sexual activity with students by a school teacher, and first degree kidnapping of two male students.

What happens to a life?

How could I reconcile this new information, this horrific, awful data more troubling in its details of decades of abuse, with the Mr. Snow I knew? What utter disconnect! How things fall apart.

My first impulse when he was imprisoned was to reach out to him, to express love for him in these worst of circumstances, but I hesitated. What could I possibly say—how did I feel about all this? Would my writing him be seen as condoning what he did? So I didn’t write, though my instinct told me to.

The disquiet I have continued to feel as years pass and he pays for his undoable crimes, leaving behind his wife and children to a legacy of shame—that disquiet has continued to tell me that the path of disregard won’t work for me. I know that no matter what he has done, he is a living, breathing human and not simply defined by his crimes. I couldn’t bear to leave him there alone.

My first letter to Mr. Snow came after three years of thoughts about my own accountability, my writing prompted by a column in the local newspaper written by a teacher about a former student of hers, a University of Virginia Jefferson Scholar with a genius IQ—and who has been in prison since 1985 for murdering his girlfriend’s parents. Jens Soering maintains his innocence and there is compelling evidence to suggest he is telling the truth.

As we corresponded after I read her article, Jean Franklin explained her continued relationship with her student, whom she also believes is innocent: “But my decision to visit Jens did not depend on his guilt or innocence. The teacher-student relationship, for me, is unconditional. They come to us, warts and all, and we try to influence them for the good. In this case, I taught Jens for two years and knew there was good in him, guilty or innocent. You may also recognize the good in your former teacher, though he wasn’t perfect.”

I don’t condone what Mr. Snow did and am repelled by his actions. I don’t doubt he is guilty as charged, nor do I lament his sentence—I believe it is just, given the unutterable anguish he caused many young boys and their families. But I do wish it had never happened—that futile kind of wish, the sad kind we sometimes have when we know it’s too late to go back.

I wish his life had taken such a different trajectory, he is so talented. But it went in this direction, and now Mr. Snow is Inmate #0787172. But he is still under there somewhere, the Mr. Snow I knew. Isn’t he? I’m not sure what writing to Mr. Snow will mean for either one of us, but I do know that in reaching out to him and extending love to him, I have found an important part of myself. He is providing me a glimpse into a world I would otherwise not know; I am a link to the world out here. Together we are navigating the difficult part of loving others.

Do-it-now Challenge
Explore and expand your capacity for love and forgiveness. Love people who are unlovable. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all.” Who in your life is unlovable? What would loving them look like? How would it change you?

~Patti Digh

Patti Digh is author of the award-winning blog, 37days (www.pattidigh.com). This essay is excerpted from her next book of essays on living a more intentional and authentic life, forthcoming from Skirt! Books in October 2008.