I barely graduated high school. And by barely, I mean “pretty sure the school counselors did some creative accounting on my transcript to keep the graduation rate high” barely. When I tell my current students this fact they are flabbergasted. I dropped this little life nugget to my Enhanced Math 1 students the other day and a third of them just sat there agog. Each day in class they are presented with a college graduate with a 20 year teaching career who can explain any math topic from 9th grade on down. What they don’t see is the awkward 90’s teenager who struggled through each day fighting depression, anxiety, imposter syndrome, and an overall belief that the world would be better off without him.
A few things literally saved my life in high school; playing roller hockey with my brother in the cul-de-sac, my love of computer games, and the big group of theatre nerds I found in sophomore year.
I finally started finding myself during my junior year. My brother moved to San Diego for college and I became more active in the school theatre. I can’t say I was much of a fan of acting, but I really liked to sing, and enjoyed doing the school musicals the most. I never had any big roles, but I thrived in the company, doing bit parts here and there. I worked tech, did box office, learned some construction skills, and was part of something created by a community. It felt like where I was supposed to be.
When you have a friend group that you feel comfortable with and trust, you tend to branch out and take more social risks. Around junior year I was introduced to tabletop roleplaying games. What a shock that a bunch of thespians would enjoy role-playing games! My earliest memories are of playing a Glitter Boy in the game Rifts, a crazy RPG that had a little bit of everything. I had no idea what I was doing, didn’t know any of the rules, but I had a giant gun that went Boom. It was amazing.
Playing these games with my friends, working on shows, and playing hockey got me through high school.
During my Community College years my friend Dave invited me to play in a weekly game of 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons. He was living in a house with three roommates and one of them, Dan, ran a game. I lived for those weekend games. I got better at school, learned how to work hard at my warehouse job lifting boxes of jigsaw puzzles, and made up crazy stories with my friends involving wizards, Drow, Illithid, and Dave’s crazy rogue.
At some point our weekly game ended. I honestly don’t remember why.
I graduated from Chapman University, earned my teaching credential, got my first big boy job, and life got way more serious. It would be about 15 years until I played D&D again.
Kevin was a 7th grade boy with a giant smile, a big laugh, and an even bigger heart. He was assigned to my Advisement class in 2006 and was also in my Intro to Pre-Algebra class. His mom had requested he have a male Advisement teacher and some strong male teacher figures, since his father had died the year before when Kevin was in 6th grade. I had played roller hockey with his father on occasion, so I recognized the last name when I looked at my rosters before school began. Knowing what he had gone through, I made it a mission of mine to be the best role model I could be for him.
During our two years together I coached him in roller hockey and helped with his struggles and challenges with ADHD. I watched him play drums in the school band, and learned of his love of music, drawing, snowboarding, and CARS! Kevin loved cars! All the cars.
He made great progress in middle school, and I felt good knowing that I had done my best to send him off to high school with the skills and confidence he needed.
As he entered high school, his mom asked if I could continue tutoring and mentoring him, which I gladly did. He continued playing roller hockey for the high school, as well as wrestled and played lacrosse. He qualified for the CIF wrestling tournament freshman year and I went to his first match in which he got pinned in under 30 seconds and left with a broken nose.
School was very hard for Kevin, which I really understood. We had some of the same struggles, so I felt like I understood him pretty well. By junior year things were not going well for him academically, so his mom decided he would attend a military academy. They provided way more structure and routine, and it was a good place for him to be. I did my best to mentor him from afar, but life got in the way and we didn’t communicate as much.
Kevin graduated high school and eventually moved to Colorado to pursue work in the automotive field. He always wanted to work on cars, and I was happy to see that he was pursuing his passion. We lost touch for a while. Then in 2015 I got a message from him saying he was back in SoCal and was looking to start playing hockey again. I jumped at the chance to get him on my adult league roller hockey team and we finally got the opportunity to play competitive hockey together.
Once a week we would lace up the skates, play on the same line and always try to get each other to score, then talk for a while in the parking lot about life. He would talk about his girlfriend, wanting to go to automotive school, and his motorcycle. I tried to teach him about budgeting, long-term investing, and why he should stop getting so many dang tattoos.
On Sunday May 17th, 2015, Kevin Michael Corey was killed while riding his motorcycle, about a month before his 21st birthday.
I was told the news on Monday morning during the ten minute snack break at school by a colleague who saw the news on Facebook.
I’ve never known a deeper pain in all of my life. An immense wave of depression, anxiety, and sorrow instantly overwhelmed me, and persisted for months. Kevin was not my child, but he was my kid. I knew him better than any student I had ever known, and his passing left a deep void in my heart.
We held a memorial for Kevin at the center of the roller hockey rink. I gave the eulogy. I hugged his family, friends, and former students.
And then I was just…empty.
I don’t remember the rest of that school year. I struggled to go to work each day. I tried to be fake happy with my students, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. I was a zombie around campus, and I couldn’t wait for summer to start so I didn’t have to be an adult for a while.
When summer did begin, things got worse. I was alone and grieving. I had no motivation to do anything and spent weeks just watching TV, playing computer games, and sleeping. It was the darkest point in my life. Until it wasn’t.
One day in July of 2015 during a mindless computer game binge I decided to play some YouTube videos in a background browser window. The autoplay feature was on and I was watching videos about board games (another passion of mine) on the Geek & Sundry channel. After a while a new video began playing that was about Dungeons & Dragons. The man in the video had a nice voice and was talking about this new show they were going to try where a bunch of nerdy voice actors would sit around and play D&D. This caught my attention. I used to love playing D&D! What is this show?
The video was 3 hours long, and I devoured the whole thing in one sitting. It was the first bit of enjoyment I felt in months. I checked the channel and found a few other episodes had been uploaded, and I watched them all in a day. It was the first time in months where I went over an hour not replaying Kevin’s death in my mind. It was such a relief.
The show was called Critical Role, and during each episode they talked about streaming their show every Thursday night on Twitch. I had never heard of that, so I quickly navigated to the site and learned it was a streaming platform for video gamers. I found the concept strange, as I would much rather play a video game than watch someone else do it. But they had other shows, and Critical Role was one of them.
And so I tuned in the next Thursday night at 7pm Pacific and watched a live stream of a bunch of friends playing Dungeons & Dragons in real-time. The episode was 4.5 hours long and it flew by. I was fully immersed in the world of Exandria created by Matthew Mercer, and was provided a brief respite from my grief. They ended the episode with a small catch phrase of “Is It Thursday Yet?”, a small nod to the fact that all of the players in the game would constantly ask if it was Thursday yet, because they loved playing D&D with each other so much.
This phrase quickly became my mantra. Every day of the week was a struggle to get through, but no matter how bad I felt I just reminded myself that another episode of Critical Role was just a few days away. Just make it to Thursday.
This went on for most of the summer, and through the next school year.
Just make it to Thursday.
I made it to Thursday.
Just make it to Thursday.
Is it Thursday yet?
At some point I realized that when I thought about Kevin I didn’t feel sadness or despair anymore, but joy in having known him. Literally every memory I have of him is a happy one, and every time I picture him in my mind he is smiling. It took almost a year to get to that point, but I finally did.
Thanks to a group of nerdy-ass voice actors who gave me a reason to keep going, find joy in my friends, and take time every day to play and imagine and wonder.
When Covid-19 forced us to close down the schools and teach from home I had a lot of free time on my hands. Separated from the people I cared about, I looked for ways to connect. Playing board games around a table was not a possibility, so I searched for ways to connect online. I quickly found a D&D group run by a great DM named Tim through the Roll20 website and began playing over voice chat every Saturday. Playing by voice only was difficult, since I couldn’t read the body language and facial expressions of my fellow party members. There was a lot of cross talk, interrupted speech, and misunderstandings at first. I adapted, however, and quickly started to look forward to my weekly games with my new friends from Seattle, Florida, and South America. Critical Role was on hiatus, so “Is It Thursday Yet?” became “Is It Saturday Yet?”.
In my time between games I began re-watching all of campaign 1 of Critical Role, as every episode was on YouTube, and it was a great thing to have on in the background. I created new digital math lessons with Scanlan, Percy, and Pike having adventures in the background. A small bit of comfort to help me pass the time.
The Covid crisis subsided, I got back into the classroom, and I started longing for my high school days of D&D. 8 hours of gaming with good friends and terrible snacks. As luck would have it, I received a text message in early 2022 from my friend Paul about joining his Shadowrun RPG group now that everyone was vaccinated and things were a bit safer. I jumped at the chance to be at the table again, and soon I was learning a whole new gaming system with my old high school friends Justin & Paul, and my new friends Keith and Greg every Friday night. Even Puck gets into the action, whether we want him to or not.
Is It Friday Yet?
I now run the Dungeons & Dragons club at school. Last year we had about 20 students show up to the club regularly, and they quickly formed playing groups. I noticed that four students kept coming to club, but didn’t join any groups to play. They wanted to learn, but didn’t really know how to begin. So I decided to run a game for them, the first time I ever took on the role of “Dungeon Master”. It was really scary. It was really fun. Now I know why Matthew Mercer always looks like he is having the time of his life every time he guides his friends through another adventure.
This year I have about 25 kids regularly come to club, and I’m running a game with 3 new students and one holdover from last year (the other three promoted to high school). Every Wednesday when the lunch bell rings I have students seemingly apparate at my door, trying to get into the room and tell stories with their friends for as much time as possible.
I love seeing the joy and surprise on their faces when the dice roll great, or horribly, and we describe together what happens to their make-believe heroes. One of my players is so invested in the game that he frequently seeks me out during break or lunch time on other days of the week to ask questions about spells his Wizard can do and what stat he should level up next. He bought a player’s handbook and brings it to school every day.
Dungeons & Dragons is not magic, and doesn’t cure depression. Rifts isn’t going to solve all of your problems, nor is Shadowrun the answer to life’s deep questions. These games are merely a mechanism for getting people into a room together to make-believe and tell stories. They provide a safe place and the structure to be your weird, quirky self, and allow you the space to bond with your friends over something that only you few will ever feel is real. I still vividly recall my friend Justin rolling a natural 20 in the most impossible scenario 25 years ago and all of us screaming wildly at 1 AM. It’s all imaginary, but it’s so very real. Those memories are something I will always share with my friends, and are some of the most cherished times of my life.
I know that I will never be friends with the cast of Critical Role. I will never sit at a table gaming with them into the wee hours of the night. Even so, I still feel a debt of gratitude to them for helping me through the darkest time in my life. Their decision to share their beloved home game of Dungeons & Dragons with the world provided me comfort and relief at a time when I needed it the most.
I still miss Kevin every day. Some days it’s a fleeting thought. A flash of his smile and the sound of his laugh. Other times I’m sad for the life I never got to see come to fruition. I imagine him working on cars all day, then meeting me at the rink for some pickup hockey and talking about life. He would show me his newest tattoo, and I’d shake my head disapprovingly, mostly in jest.
I rarely make deep connections with students in the same way anymore, mostly as a defense mechanism to guard against feeling the same sorrow ever again. It’s not logical, but it’s what I do. The best I can do now is open my classroom every Wednesday at lunch and provide some of the most vulnerable and marginalized students at school a safe place to be their weird selves. In a small way my room is their Critical Role, and I’m happy to provide them that safe place of comfort and joy. I hope Kevin would be proud.
Is It Wednesday Yet?
P.S. – I got the first and only tattoo of my life a year after Kevin died. It is a memorial to him and the joy he brought to me. I think he would like it.
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