This is when I met Mr. Price. He was my grade 13 English teacher. He spoke with a heavy English accent and I couldn’t understand him at all. I decided to speak to him and tell him about my problem. He listened sympathetically. Little did I know that he took my problem to heart. Mr. Price was a wonderful teacher. He was kind, caring and very funny. He took interest in me. Instead of ignoring me and letting me stumble by myself, he asked me a question every day. It was always a question that I could answer. He continued like this for a while and then stopped asking me at all for a while. He continued asking me and not asking me for the whole year. This method worked very well with me. I was relaxed. I knew that I could answer him and then I knew I could just sit there and enjoy the class. And enjoy I did!
It didn’t take me long to fall deeply in love with him. Mr. Price was in his middle thirties, and though not very handsome, had a nice face and a terrific sense of humor. He was also, though I didn’t know it at the time, gay. I enjoyed the class very much. He was the best teacher I ever had.
I worked hard. At the end of the year I received 77% in English! My average was over 80% and I became an Ontario Scholar! I was ecstatic! I couldn’t have done it with any other English teacher. Half of my diploma belongs to Mr. Price.
To my surprise, I met him on the street one day when the school was over, close to where I lived. I was too nervous to speak and he said something noncommittally. We walked together for about half a block and said goodbye to each other. I never saw him again.
This grade 13 school year was the happiest and the saddest year of my life.
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Next year I went to university. I work hard but was not interested in anything else. I graduated with an Honors degree in Mathematics and a minor in, what else, English. But my job history was less than stellar. I had several jobs. Each time I had to leave because of my depression and anxiety. The details are not important to this story.
My depression really developed when I learned, from my aunt in Poland, that my father had died. I had not realized until that time how much I had missed him and loved him. And now he was dead! At the same time I was reading a book about three generations of people living on a ranch in America. The story followed their lives. Birth, struggles and deaths. It made no sense to me. What was the purpose of life? What was the goal? To be born, grow up, have children and die; the children then grow up and have children and die, etcetera. Why? What’s the sense? I become very depressed. This was strange for someone who grew up in Poland, a very Catholic country. My depression took many sides: physical, mental and spiritual. I became suicidal. I lost hope. Within a period of a few years I tried to kill myself many times. But something inside me resisted and I sought help in the last moment. I got some medication from a doctor, but it didn’t help. I struggled with the depression, on and off, most of my life.
