Goodbye, Mr Dibbs

The headmaster was always such a stern and serious man, which is why we all took notice when he stood up at assembly that day with damp eyes and cheeks.
“Gentlemen,” he said (that was how he always began his speeches), “this morning I received a phone call from Mr Dibbs’ wife.”
A pause then, as the headmaster took a deep breath. He sniffed, raised his glasses to wipe his eyes, then continued: “She rang to say that Mr Dibbs’ treatment has not been effective, and he has chosen to discontinue it. He has decided to go home to his wife, Jane, their children, Joseph and Deborah, three grandchildren, Joshua, Aiden and Amelia, and two Yorkshire Terriers, Sonny and Cher.”
The headmaster removed his reading glasses. This always indicated that he was about to make a joke. “Mr Dibbs would want me,” he said, “to say at this point that he did not personally name his dogs, though he did veto the name ‘Madonna’ on grounds of faith.” The headmaster gave us a self-satisfied little beam, went to put his glasses back on, paused, and lowered them again. “I also note that the dogs do not sing in tune.”
A ripple of reluctant laughter. The headmaster finally returned his glasses to his face. “Few of us understood how sick Mr Dibbs was last year, but he insisted on coming to school. There was no need for him to do that – the school was obliged to pay sick leave – but Mr Dibbs – Henry wanted to be here. I believe he decided at some point that, if he had only a short time left, he wanted to spend as much of that time as possible with you.” The headmaster’s voice weakened. He seemed to flail for words. “Perhaps you don’t know this, boys, but many of your teachers love their jobs. Nothing is more rewarding than uplifting other people, and we receive chances every day to do just that.” His faced changed; he smiled wryly. “Many days are frustrating – infuriating, even.” His face softened again. “But there are always moments of grace. We are given constant reminders of why we chose this work in the first place.”

The headmaster took his glasses off, folded them, and placed them on the lectern. “Few teachers love their work as much as Henry did. I would miss him for that reason alone.” He stopped a second, then struck out on a new track: “When I met Henry, he still had hair. He used to come to me each term with an idea for a song the whole school could sing together. Apparently he did the same thing with the headmaster before me. But the old headmaster did not enjoy your singing very much, and turned the idea down repeatedly. I do not know how persistent Henry was with him, but he was extremely persistent with me. After a year or so of refusals, when I felt I had finally found my feet here, I gave in. I’m glad I did. I think it’s given something to you boys, something to the school, and also something to Henry. He was always so excited about the school song. He spent weeks researching. I remember he came to me one year, trembling, to ask if he could choose a pop song. I asked him what; he said My Way by Frank Sinatra.”
The headmaster chuckled; for once, we laughed with him.
“You will have noticed how beautiful the songs were last year,” said the headmaster. “Do you remember them?”
We grumbled and mumbled and murmured. Some clown yelled out, “Yes!”
“Good,” said the headmaster. “You know, I believe we become adult when we start remembering. When we are young, we have everything to look forward to. Young people tend to rush single-mindedly ahead. But at some point, you find yourself looking backwards, at things that are finished. At first you regret, then you long. At some point, this feeling catches up with itself, implodes, and that is when you find yourself treasuring life. You no longer long for what you had; you long for what you have. It is a very strange feeling. I think it stems from an understanding of the ending of things. It becomes very clear to you when you notice that your children are growing; it is inescapable when your parents die. You find yourself holding your mother; it feels like a minute ago she was holding you. Where did all the time go? All those experiences, those moments, the opportunities you did or did not take – everything is nothing then; it may as well never have been there. All you have is this frail little woman, whom you know you love, though it has sometimes been challenging, and who you know loves you. I think that is really what it means to love someone: when everything collapses down to a second, and if you were born just then, looking at them, you would know that they were special to you. Sometimes, when we meet people, we do know that already. Love changes the way we are. We still long, we still regret; but these things are different. They become channels for the wish to love. I still regret things about my relationship with my parents. I wish I’d told them I loved them more. I wish I’d held them more, caressed just one more time. I wish I had been braver. At the same time, I know that, even if I had done all these a thousand more times, it still would not have been enough. We never, ever quite love enough.”

The headmaster caught himself. He had never spoken to us like that. For a second he seemed sheepish; then he shook his head, as though to rattle away a little voice inside it, and carried on. “If I feel this way now, in my fifties, with another thirty years ahead of me, imagine how Mr Dibbs must feel, knowing he only has a few weeks? What does it mean to wake up in the morning when you can count your remaining sunrises on the fingers of one hand? How does one kiss their wife goodnight when they know tonight’s kiss might be the last one?

“Some of you have almost finished school. I’m sure it has been a chore to you sometimes, sometimes a bore. But you will be sad the day you leave here. You will look back and say, ‘Somehow it was more special than I ever realised.’ Sometimes I imagine how life would be if we lived it out of order: if we were seven one day, seventy the next, seventeen the day after. I feel like we would appreciate it better. We would live it with gratitude and perspective. If you know you will miss high school, imagine how much more you will miss life. Everything you have ever known – the birds, blue sky, music, laughter, language, the people you love – taken away; in its absence, perhaps you will realise how precious it was. In life there are two miracles. The first of them is life itself: the fact that there is something where there very well might have been nothing, and that something is so vast, intricate, and complex. Colour, change, hope, dreams – life is the first miracle. The second miracle is that we share it. If God is alone, why aren’t we? We look out on the world, and some parts of the world look out with us. I think that’s what a soul is: the fact that, in this world, something is looking. That’s what a dog recognises when they run up to you in a park; that’s why they get so excited to see you. Love connects souls, beneath the surface of the world, like an underground river. I suspect, deep down, we love everyone, and at the end of our lives, when everything breaks apart, and we have nothing left to ask for, nothing left to miss, nothing to struggle for or against, we will see that every single person has been precious to us, because we shared this life with them. And I think, if we got the chance, we would go to them all and say ‘Thank you;’ but we don’t get that chance, because they don’t see things the way we do: they’re still all caught up in the mess.”

The headmaster stopped, looked around, and smiled. There was not a sound in the hall. His voice softened a little. “Anyway,” he said. “Today we’re doing something special. Some of you know that Mr Dibbs, his wife, and his two hounds live just a couple of blocks from here. And since it’s a lovely day, we’re going to walk there. I have no permission for this, so I ask you to please be sensible. We’re going to Mr Dibbs’ house to sing to him.” The headmaster wiped his eye with the heel of his hand. He sniffed. “So up, up all of you. Follow your housemasters.”

Murmuring and commotion, the sound of five hundred chairs shifting, the rumble of a thousand feet. Outside the housemasters were waving placards; they looked terribly stressed. But it was a lovely day – it was springtime. The air was warm, the insects purred away happily, flowers adorned the trees. Little spots of colour, a huge blue sky; the air tasted like freedom. We walked in a large mass, temporarily disturbing traffic, down the street.

Mr Dibbs was sitting on the veranda of his house, looking out over a neat little flowerbed, and a lawn, and a low white fence, onto the street. His wife was sitting next to him, a tall lady with very straight white hair. They were holding hands. There was a blue oxygen tank on a trolley next to their seat; Mr Dibbs was hooked in to it by a tube that wrapped around under his nose. He was gaunt and pale and utterly hairless. He seemed surprised to see us, or perhaps just glad. I suspect someone had told him we were coming, for he was wearing a suit and tie. The suit hung off him like it belonged to someone much bigger. He looked a little like a turtle – there were so many finger-widths the collar and his neck. But he was smiling.

We milled on the street. Some of us stood on the driveway; Mr Dibbs beckoned to us to stand on the lawn. One thing you will always notice about private schoolboys is that they’re terribly afraid of standing on nice grass. A few of us sat on the fence; most of us were spread out across the road.

Somehow Miss Jensen, the drama teacher, emerged from inside the house. We were all surprised to see that, not least Mr Dibbs. He started up, then laughed. She spoke to him on the balcony, then she turned to us, raised herself up to her full five-foot-three-inches, and called out in a shrill but well-trained voice, “Do you all remember Over the Rainbow?”
We replied with a chorus of cheers.
“Okay, then!” cried Miss Jensen. She stood up even taller – stood on her tip-toes – called out “One, two, three!” counting along with the fingers on her right hand, then started making movements like a conductor. I do not know if they meant anything – practically none of us did. I suspect, like all drama teachers, she was just doing it because it looked right. Somehow, it had the effect of keeping us roughly in time, and also, because the movements of her hands were almost uniformly upwards, it made us sing louder. Louder, but not better. Everything was out of tune. The basses were interspersed with the twelve-year-olds, many of whom were not at school last year, and did not know the song. There was a general disagreement about the key of the music; there was also disagreement regarding the words. I only really sang the chorus. Most of us mumbled the rest, while one extremely enthusiastic voice carried high above us. At one point the Yorkshire Terriers joined in, and then all the dogs on the rest of the street. A car blew its horn at us for blocking the road. And Miss Jensen stood on tip-toe up the front, swinging her arms about wildly, mouthing the words so big her jaw must certainly have popped out of its socket.

In a word, it was all a tremendous mess, but it was a mess full of love, and such is life. Mr Dibbs sat very still on the balcony, looking at us as very gently, as though from very far away, not afraid to look any of us in the eye, and we, as a mass, not afraid to look back. He looked at us, and held his wife’s hand. She was crying, but he didn’t cry. He was smiling. Somehow, in my memory, he shines.

Old Man Jim
John Markese
John Markese - Portraiture and Figurative Painting