A reader suggested I write about Florida high school teacher David Menasche. Her sons graduated from the Miami school where Menasche used to teach.
After brain cancer stole most of his sight, memory and mobility, Menasche had to give up teaching at Coral Reef Senior High.
Before he died, he wanted to write about his years in the classroom but found that brain surgery, while buying him time, erased many of his recollections. He decided to travel the country to check in with former students and ask whether his teaching had made a difference in their lives. Menasche hoped those conversations would help him remember.
He funded his trip in part from donations, explaining
,"I am going to travel to as many places as I can to meet with the people who knew me in hopes of reclaiming my past through their recollections and establishing a future through the new relationships being made and experience to be had. The fact that I am traveling alone on a train through the winter to meet with unfamiliar people in strange and new cities while diseased, blind and crippled will not deter me. The need to know what I’ve forgotten and learn who I really was and am is too all consuming to be shelved by fear or logic. I am compelled by my curiosity. I do not know what destinations and realizations I will ultimately
