Dr. Grauer's Column - Dr. Edi and the Healing of Schools

Dr. Edi and the Healing of Schools
By Stuart Grauer

Quite a few years ago, we became friends with a wonderful psychologist from the neighboring town of La Jolla who loved schools and saw them, at their best, as places of healing. That was Edith Eva Eger, whom we came to call Dr. Edi. At a young age, she survived the Holocaust and its concentration camps, though her parents perished — smoke coming up from the ovens before her eyes.

Rather than let this become a path into depression and despair, Dr. Edi treated it as a mandate: to teach everyone she could, all over the world, that they had a choice in how they moved ahead after trauma. “Part of me was left at Auschwitz, but not the better part.”

When we addressed tolerance schoolwide at The Grauer School, or in middle school history, or high school groups studying Holocaust history or psychology, Edi was there with this message, always willing, irrepressible. Before too long, we named her our first Grauer School Emeritus Faculty member.

I loved watching her with high schoolers most, since they deserved the kind of listening and accountability Dr. Edi held them to—she was the right kind of role model for kids who might now and then forget they are not victims, that they can take charge of their lives despite social, family, academic and other pressures they drift in and out of.  And yet, it was amazing watching her with middle schoolers as well—they had never heard of the Holocaust and their innocent eyes hung on her as she’d call them honey and dah-ling, telling story after story, each with a moral. I still have a video of one of these sessions.

Not only middle schoolers, but everyone could be a little more innocent around Edi. And it just amazed me that as she was becoming world renowned (Oprah appearances, etc.), she took the time to come out and talk to a class every time we asked, no exception. And every time she showed up, we had a little more time to feel, permission to feel. So many of our kids today are letting trauma define them and Edi was sure, as are all the educators and parents I appreciate most, that we need not.

Even at barely five feet tall and 100 pounds, with those piercing eyes she was nobody’s pushover. Healing was serious business and her mission was to make it happen.

Eventually she wrote a great book, The Choice: Embrace the Possible, and we held her world launch at The Grauer School. Over 400 people packed into Meyer Hall. Even way back on the other side of the fireplace people gathered, some looking on right through the hearth opening. People hushed before this force of history and nature, and she gave a beautiful talk that made everyone feel like she surely was talking personally just to them, and she told of Holocaust horrors and concluded:

“The greatest prison is not the one built of walls and barbed wire. It is the prison we build in our own minds. And the key has always been with us. We cannot choose what happened to us. We can choose what we become because of it.”

After that talk, I was terribly worried about Edi. She must have been around 90 years old and, after a rousing speech, not only did she give her signature ballet kick (with one of us on each side of her), but she sat down at a table we placed in front, stacks of books all around it, and commenced signing books.

Rather than simply write “Love, Edi,” or something brief, she insisted on knowing every single book buyer. I tried to reason with her, demanding she curtail this exhausting practice and worrying about her strength: “Edi just sign your name, that will be fine!”  But I got nowhere. She was going to sign and personally dedicate every single book if it took all night and we carried her out of there. Of course, she did fine.

She was wonderful with our students, who paid rapt attention to every word she said. No forum was too big or too small for her, even after The Choice became a national bestseller and her fame was spreading.

As is true in almost all my relationships coming out of leadership, Edi was not only a resource for the school but a personal friend. Neither of us believed much in work-life separation—our professions are our actual lives, and we shared that approach to living. Not long after her bestseller, I headed up to her home high on Mt. Soledad, winding up the sunny, steep streets that reminded me of the Mediterranean. I’m not saying whether I was at her long lunch table then or sitting on her office couch facing her, because there was not much difference: just being with Edi was therapeutic. She was a proud person, and still, rather than gloat about her bestseller, she looked into me and said:

“Dahling, you are destined write the bestseller that we need for healing our schools.”

That may have been the tallest order I was ever given in my whole life, and I spent the next few years writing and re- and re-re writing and interweaving stories, never stopping on any one of them (and there are 47) until I felt Edi would find it to be healing. No charge in my life, no art or craft, has been greater than the idea that a real teacher is a healer, and that our schools must be places of healing—especially as we work with teens. And only when I could show that book to Edi (and eventually to her daughter Marianne) did I know it was ready.

Eventually Edi could hardly get out much, and by the time she was 98 years old, all we could do was drop off delicacies and flowers, run errands, and stay close. Not just my family: quite a few parents and alumni from our school had become friends, clients, companions, and admirers of Edi by then.  

We live in a fractured world these days and I’m sure she knew that, and knew that we still have choices to make every day about whether we’ll get carried into all that fracturing or focus instead about our real community and how to show those people who are real to us that we care and that they matter. And then at some point, we get beyond all that anyway, on that higher plain.

Dr. Edi, Grandma Edi, Edith Eva Eger was a true American hero and icon and died on April 27, surrounded by her family from around the country. At our school, and in many others around the world, there will never be a greater challenge or calling than living up to her vision for what a teacher can be, what a school can be.

We love you, Dr. Edi.

COMMENT! Click on the "Comments" drop-down box below to share a comment.

SHARE! Click on the social media icons below or copy the link to share this column.