The Queen and the French Teacher
We share a birthday, the queen and I. I was born on April 21, on her twenty-seventh birthday, little more than a year from the day in February she had been crowned after the death of her father. Elizabeth died last Thursday, so we share a birthday no more.
She died a queen, that title both lifting her up and weighing her down; conveying little actual authority, but considerable responsibility; granting her unrivaled access across seven decades to the wealthy, the powerful, and the notorious, but leaving her little time or space or cause to simply be, to simply be Elizabeth.
Her death has unleashed a torrent of public opinion, her title and the unprecedented length of her reign making her a lodestone both of fervent acclamation and vehement denunciation. She is adored for performing her royal duties with decorum and dignity, with grace and humor, and she is reviled for epitomizing Britain’s dubious colonial legacy and for failing to publicly disown it.
I am not sure she deserves either. Yes, she dutifully fulfilled the requirements of her unique office with a style particularly decorous and gentle and humble, but the outsized and undifferentiated adulation she is now garnering speaks more to the human need for heroes and saints than it does her qualification to be the one or the other. And, though she is heir to the burden of Britain’s sins, enchained to a past she cannot escape and constrained by the ongoing obligation to buoy the spirits of the present commonwealth by embodying its honor and dignity and pride, it is her title, her office, her heritage that merits unflinching critique, not her person.
Gloria Jean Pollard died last Thursday, in Scarborough, Maine. She and I do not share a birthday, but she shares with Elizabeth their death day. Ms. Pollard had no title, but she did have an office: French teacher. This daughter of Italian immigrants taught French for thirty years, much of it at Yarmouth High School, earning the honor of State Foreign Language Teacher of the Year in 1996. Her office granted her access to children, to human beings with bodies and minds and spirits still forming, still becoming, supple and elastic, not yet hardened and brittle, but tender and fragile and vulnerable, too. She likewise deserves praise for fulfilling her vital duties with skill and sensitivity, with eagerness and attentiveness.
The queen and the French teacher share a death day, but more, too, much more. Despite personal histories and family legacies and public personas and public perceptions that are literally worlds apart, they both died, not as queen and French teacher, but as mothers, grandmothers, widows, women. They both knew the unparalleled anguish and elation of birthing a child, the delight and heartache of raising a child, the thrill and the tedium, the unready challenges and the unexpected discoveries, the sorrow and the joy, of sharing a bed, a home, a life with a husband for a lifetime, and the unquenchable grief of outliving him.
They were both given life, as it came to them, and the opportunity to live it, as it happened to them: with gratitude or with bitterness, with hope or with despair, selflessly or selfishly, lovingly or callously. This is what matters. This is how we should judge them. This is how we should remember them, not merely or especially because of their offices, for how they performed their duties, not as queen and French teacher, but as Elizabeth and Gloria, Lilibet and Glo, as two women whose distinctive and deeply personal and ultimately simple ways of being, of simply being, are indelibly etched on the spirits of those who loved them and live on, in memory and in tears.