.

I feel I owe you all a coherent post, and I have been trying to write it for several hours.

But I don't know where to start.

R's funeral was today. It was awful. Inexpressably, hideously, cruelly awful. I don't know how to even begin to describe it: How it was to see the casket as it passed me, the unbearable sadness of the photos of him as a six-year-old in a gold paper crown.

And I could tell you now all the things I wish I could've said or done to change things. All the things I regret. But as my husband (beautiful and supportive as ever) said to me this afternoon when he held me shaking: Everyone who cared about him will be thinking those things, Meg. It doesn't mean they're true.

And I did care about R.

All you teachers out there will understand this:

R. was different.

Number one, he was physically very different, as a result of a genetic condition he was born with. He also had a severe visual impairment that made reading and writing extremely difficult for him.

But number 2, R. had been difficult. In the past anyway. Not just run-of-the-mill difficult, but serious difficult. Offensive, dangerous difficult. Hostile, angry, even disturbed. And we don't have a hell of a lot of those kids at my school.

Fortunately, by the time I knew him, he had mellowed out. He had "found God" - in fact was a leader at a local evangelical church- and was vehemently promoting drug use as a consciousness-expander amongst his peers.

It sounds funny, but he really was.

R. was a real character.

And I was really fond of him. My mum has called it a special interest. And she is right. R was very opinionated, and highly articulate and intelligent. He constantly challenged both me and his peers on our ideas about the text or the issue being studied. He made our English classes interesting, bursting out as he did with his strong, sometimes out-there ideas. Creating delicious argument among kids who are so used to sitting silently and accepting.

R. was truly, truly one of a kind. You don't forget kids like that.

Instead, you just wish you had the time to thank them.

So there it is, I guess, out in the internet, his safe place:

Thank you, R.

Thank you so much.