I spent most of yesterday trying to take in the numbing news that Kris Novaez, the choir director at Union Grove High School, had been killed (along with her husband) in a motorcycle accident the night before. The first Facebook posts seemed utterly preposterous – surely just a cruel joke. But no, real life turned out to be far more cruel than any bad joke could be, and as the messages kept coming, it quickly became clear that this was all too real. And with the shattering headlines emblazoning both area newspapers this morning came an awful sense of finality. No, it wasn’t a terrible dream. No, it wasn’t some terrible joke. Yes, it really happened. Yes, they are really gone. And in the wake of their unexpected and tragically untimely deaths, there are hundreds- no, thousands of young people who have had the very ground beneath their feet shaken by this awful loss. I cannot imagine their hurt and sorrow. (I’m thinking about Kris’s music students at Union Grove, and her husband’s students at Central High School, where he taught German and coached forensics.)
I feel an enormous sense of loss even though I really didn’t know Kris Novaez all that well. I believe we first met very briefly at a state solo & ensemble contest (probably seeing each other as two blurs as we rushed off to accompany the next event on our bulging schedules) and certainly I knew of her good work because of one of her students, Chase Tonar, who grew up at Holy Communion. I got to really know her, however, in the fall of 2008. It turns out that during the freak tornado outbreak that previous January, she and her husband’s home was pretty much destroyed in the storm. One day that following fall, I received an email from Kris with a desperate S.O.S. Union Grove always attended a solo & ensemble contest in the fall (unlike Racine and Kenosha, who have theirs in the spring) and as luck would have it, that year’s contest fell exactly on the date when she and her husband would be moving – and there was just no way to adjust those plans without drastically delaying when they would get to move in to their new house. Her question was whether or not I would be willing to come in and play for her students in that fall’s competition, and since solo & ensemble accompanying is one of my favorite things to do, I eagerly said yes. I still remember walking into the Union Grove H.S. choir room for the first time, not knowing exactly what to expect, and almost instantly feeling welcome and at home. And although Kris was right there in the room as the rehearsals began, she turned the students over to me with full trust that we would figure everything out – and we did. And what ensued was a very satisfying and pleasurable collaboration that I was happy to continue when Kris asked me back for a couple more contests after that.
Kris also brought me in to lead a choral clinic at the school, an undertaking which proved to be a bit more challenging and humbling for me. I didn’t realize that the big mass choir with which I would be working would include middle schoolers, and my gifts for working with that particular age group are pretty modest. I did all I could to make it work, but it was far from a stirring success…. although you would never know it from Kris’s enthusiastic compliments afterwards. She had to know as well as I did (probably better) that the day had been a long, hard slog for everyone concerned but she was obviously very anxious that I not feel too badly about how things had gone. In a moment when I was feeling like an inept also-ran, she could not have been kinder.
That’s one of the qualities which made her such a fine choir director – she genuinely cared about her students and treated them kindly. But she was also a straight-shooter who had a real gift for seeing past the games that students sometimes like to play. And like most great teachers I know, she understood her students and their joys, fears, strengths and weaknesses. She had a fabulous sense of humor. She was a crackerjack musician. Most of all, she brought untiring energy and joy to her work, to the point where it probably didn’t even look like work to others… and probably didn’t feel like work to her. And students are the first to know if their music teacher is just coasting, content to do as little as possible. But Kris was the kind of teacher who gave everything she had and everything she was to her students- and they adored her for it, and responded in kind. And that makes it hard to even imagine what kind of grief they must be feeling right now.
I thought about their grief this afternoon when I spent a few minutes in front of Polly’s top choir at Tremper High School, introducing them to my Christmas piece “Pace.” Looking out at those 70-some young and happy faces, I suddenly found myself with a new sense of the overwhelming sorrow which had to be casting its shadow over Union Grove’s choir students at that moment. I desperately wanted to say something to those Tremper singers about what I was feeling, but I’d arrived later than planned and time was short – and also I wasn’t sure that I could get through any remarks without blubbering. So we just sang the song, which includes these words: In the midst of things we cannot understand, may we know the comfort of the Master’s hand.
That’s my prayer.
* My blog entry from October 25, 2008 talks about the experiencing of playing for Union Grove’s solo & ensemble students- and of my frantic fears that I wouldn’t get back to Kenosha in time for Rita Torcaso’s wedding. (But I did.) Read about it, if you like. Notice the photo with that entry, which shows one wall of the Union Grove choir room that has been painted by various choir alums wanting to leave a tangible sign that they were there. It’s a neat tradition.