A Room for Joy

When tragedy strikes, I know people who build mental rooms. The grief stays in one. Work in another. Family needs in a third. This isn’t denial—it’s survival. They have learned to close doors without locking them. They may visit the pain room daily, but on their terms. Ten minutes to cry. Twenty to rage. Then shut that door and open another.

You might think of this as unhealthy, but compartmentalizing isn’t about avoiding pain—it’s about functioning when everything inside might otherwise collapse.

The trick so I have heard… Never mistake closed doors for sealed vaults. Let yourself process it all in time. Maybe you process in contained bursts that don’t consume your entire existence. Maybe you try to make time to focus on joy until it becomes a room of its own… or perhaps until it is the lifeline that threads through all of those mental rooms.

Since I first met him, John Evans has always embodied joy to me. He is such a thread. When John is in it, the room is full of joy. He is a like-minded soulmate. What are we doing in elementary education if life can’t be fun? Participate in one game night organized by John Evans and you too will be hooked.  Like me, you will find yourself drawn to him and his decisive and positive energy.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It was sort of disheartening to me that it was going to be so disgusting here (in Wheeling) while we were walking, but I know it won’t feel that way, because I’ll be talking to you, John.

John Evans: Oh, I can be a little sunshine for you, I hope

Elizabeth Hofreuter: You are a little sunshine for me.

I asked John to be one of my very first walks. We were supposed to take to the trails together in October in Austin, TX, but life happens when you are making other plans. As a second best alternative, we committed to a virtual walk from opposite coasts since John Evans is the Head of School at Village School in Pacific Palisades, CA. Yes, the Pacific Palisades – the area where wildfires ravaged whole communities… including John’s school.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: When you and I did not walk in October. I wasn’t upset. I literally had this feeling we weren’t supposed to walk yet.

John Evans: Yeah.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I cried when I heard you lost your school because your heart is right there on your sleeve, and I knew it the minute I met you. I couldn’t imagine at first the pain you were experiencing, and then very quickly,  I thought, I can’t imagine anybody else leading children and parents and teachers through this, but you.

While the brick and mortar is in ashes, John is very successfully leading the school back to joy. Finding his way through tragedy is a journey with which he has become all too familiar, but he finds the greatest inspiration in the resilience of children.

Liz: I just have to ask, because my heart broke when you sent the email that you were in the hospital with your husband who broke his arm while skiing… right after you told me that you finally had room to breathe. What is tragedy on top of tragedy like for you right now?

John Evans: You know, I think it’s really odd to say this out loud, but the truth is, it’s become my normal. You know my headship has been scarred, laden with one tragedy after another. I started at Village in the pandemic. I got the job in 2019 and started July 1, 2020. I was handed keys and told, “Good luck opening the school.” That July 1st both my brother and my assistant head of school were diagnosed with cancer. My brother’s doing well, but my assistant head passed away the next year…and then after that… the fire. So I just feel like there’s been just a ton of heaviness and trauma. But I’m really good at compartmentalizing, which I didn’t realize I was so good at.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: And John, I love that your husband’s broken arm didn’t even make that list

John Evans: No, it sure didn’t. Poor guy!

Elizabeth Hofreuter:Have you come up with a metaphor of any kind for what it’s like to have lost your school in a fire?

John Evans: I mean, I’ve been focused so much on the future, so much on moving forward, I think the biggest piece for me was taking the lessons from the pandemic … be transparent. Tell the parents everything. Do not leave any stone unturned in terms of communication, and get those kids back together as soon as possible. So that’s why I, with my competitive spirit, rushed out immediately to get space… to find the best possible space and to start making it home. I’m only thinking about what’s next as opposed to what happened. Obviously we deal with trauma. But as Michael Thompson and Rob Evans said to my entire community, “The kids are all right.” And they look to the adults to make sure that we’re handling things in the right way. So that’s what my primary focus has been on making sure the teachers and the parents are okay, so that the kids can just keep doing what they need to be doing…learning, raising their hands, getting messy, you know.. playing at recess …all the good stuff.

…the pandemic feels like it pales in comparison to this, you know. Like, if you think of it as a game of Jenga. I just don’t even know what lever to pull. I just look forward, and I’m taking small wins and going day by day.

Taking small wins. Compartmentalizing. Yes, the pandemic taught every head of school I know how to compartmentalize. In one room you were a public health expert. In another, a psychologist. A strategist in another. In time we added a room for construction projects and campus planning. The list went on and on. For me there was also a great room just for Grace, Ella and me where we had prom night dressed in our best dining on the homemade sushi Grace rolled. There were no events or dinners to run off to – nothing that stole my “off hours” away from my girls. 

At a time when I too had to make sure all the WCDS children were all right, I also had more room to make sure my girls were all right too. It wasn’t a small win. It was a big one. It’s odd thinking that I miss some of that.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I just finished a walk called The Oxygen Mask about taking care of ourselves, and I didn’t hear that in your list of things you’re doing, but I did hear you allude to the way we look to a flight attendant during turbulence. And if the flight attendants are okay, we’re not panicking. This thing’s not going down.

John Evans: Yeah, no, that’s a really good metaphor, for sure. And you know, my husband, who takes very good care of me, at one point said, “You’re not taking the oxygen mask,” and I was like, “Leave me alone.” Admittedly, I think there have been moments where I haven’t stopped to take breaths when I should have, but now I’m starting to, you know, weave those in more consistently and really focus on the wins…

He hasn’t built that room to focus only on himself… yet, but he promises that is on the horizon. Less than four years after the fear of the pandemic, John is faced with the unknown again. The devastation this time is catastrophic. It is unreal.. although it is a reality I imagined when I walked off campus back in March 2020. I think of it in slow motion…turning off the lights, locking the door, taking what I feared was one last look around. It is like a scene in a movie I saw, not a moment I lived. As John recounts the similar events of the day the fire spread, he sounds like he is just telling me a story. 

John Evans: I was in the middle of a meeting with my director of athletics, and we were talking about a really important problem. We had too many kids enrolled for sports for the winter season. It was like we were giggling. We were so happy that we had 48 kids sign up to play basketball and volleyball. And so we’re talking about having to find more coaches… and then my assistant came in and said, “I need you to see something,” and I went out and saw billowing smoke.

I was like,” Oh, no! What is that?” We watched it for a good 30 seconds, and then saw orange flashes and we knew.

Right then I called my CFO. The Admin team came together, and within 10 minutes we had a communication out to all of our families saying, “Come, pick up your kids.” We just basically got everybody out super efficiently. I had to drive a kindergartner with me from the school. I was the last person to leave with little Everly Krubich in my backseat because her parents were trapped up in the Highlands. They had fire behind them and in front of them, and they couldn’t get out. Eventually, they did, but I had their daughter for about an hour.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: Is that one of your crisis scenarios that you had planned for?

John Evans: No. Definitely, not. I mean, we were able to call on our protocols for how to keep the kids safe and to move swiftly. I’m so proud of my teaching staff, and how folks just remained calm. What was amazing to me was having the kids all in the gym trying to keep them calm and happy. And some of the older kids, like the 6th graders, had kids sitting in their laps, and they were taking the role of caretaker and helping out. So it was a true, beautiful community moment, but it was also really scary. It was crazy out there, you know. People were pulling off to the side and getting out of the cars and running for safety. And then trucks had to barrel through, wrecking hundreds of cars because they needed to get to the fire. I don’t even know how to describe it. Dystopia.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It sounds like you’re describing a scene from an LA movie, not an LA school.

When we retell a tragedy, something strange happens – the raw, chaotic experience becomes packaged into a narrative with structure and meaning. When we share the stories, we naturally impose order – selecting details, creating cause-and-effect relationships, building toward climactic moments, and offering meaning or lessons. This narrative structuring helps us process overwhelming events, but simultaneously creates some underlying tension. We’re aware that our tidy retellings, however necessary for communication, inevitably fail to capture the full weight of what actually happened to us and to the people in our care. The gap between raw experience and narrative serves as both shield and balm. When we turn overwhelming pain into a story with coherent shape, we give it its own room and we gain some measure of control over experiences that originally left us powerless. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It has to feel like you were there, but you weren’t there… like you’re telling me a story that somehow your nervous system is letting you believe is just a story and not reality.

John Evans: Yeah, yeah, no. True. That’s very true. 

John Evans: As we all know, grief is a wave, and it’s going to be felt in different ways throughout a very long time. But I knew immediately that the best thing to do was to get these kids with their friends and their teachers. Because that’s what children need. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: Resilient little ones.

John Evans: Yeah, adaptable and strong. And you know, our theme this year was leadership, and we had these banners made with our Village values. They’re beautifully done, and they were hung on the campus, and one of them survived, which is kind of incredible. 

John Evans: It’s pretty extraordinary. I have a picture of a mom who lived in the neighborhood, whose home burned down, so she had a pass to get in early, and she was the first who walked the campus. I think it was like 48 hours later, and she picked it up and held it. It’s quite beautiful.

It says Village builds courageous leaders. So we decided to move the focus from leadership to courage and talk about what courage actually is… leading from the heart with the root word “cor” meaning heart. So we focused a lot on that – just getting kids to understand how resilient they are and how adaptable they’ve been. 

John’s story is starting to come around to that beautiful conclusion – a story of courage – of heart. Like a good story it also seems to have a prologue recognizable only in hindsight.

John Evans: I wrote this piece, Liz, on January 6, after a really wonderful break that was now, when I look back, prophetic in its resonance, because it was all about Pema Chodron’s famous words, “Nothing ever really goes away until it has taught us what we need to know”…what we need to learn.  And it’s almost like I was preparing everybody for a real challenge to come.

We never know how the story is going to go. When we think we have learned the lesson, sometimes we have not. There is more to come. I am learning there is no prescribed timeline. No date by which to get over it. No box to check off. Even when we think we have learned what we need to know, some new challenge may lie in wait to test us. We may not have fully processed the lessons. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I have only just realized that one of the reasons this year is turning into a full year without a position instead of a shorter period of time as I thought it would be is because I still had so much healing to do between what I experienced with Covid and then losing my mom, my dad and my stepmother and I needed to heal, and I had no idea how much I needed to heal. But the other thing I’ve learned is that everybody’s timeline’s different.  I’m not healing late. This is just when my time was to heal.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: You’ll heal when your body and your spirit need it.

In the meantime, John has that gift to find and celebrate the joy. There’s a profound alchemy in finding joy within or after tragedy – not as erasure of what was lost, but as affirmation of what remains, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit… as seen in the resilience of children.

John Evans: The thing that I’m most proud of is just how we all came together at Village. How everybody was able to see the important aspects of community and lean into that  – that has felt really powerful.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: And something you can hold, no matter what comes next.

John Evans: Exactly.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: So you did it. You had the center hold when most people wouldn’t.

John Evans: And I learned that from Covid. I mean, all of these things do teach us what we need to learn.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: If we’re open to learning

John Evans: If we’re open to it. 

Nothing ever really goes away until it’s taught us what we need to know, what we need to learn. Maybe we can learn some of those lessons from the stories that connect us. When our personal anguish or suffering becomes communicable, we’re no longer alone with our grief. The storytelling itself becomes a communal act that can bring witnesses into our experience without overwhelming them or ourselves.

Perhaps most importantly, shaping tragedy into narrative allows us to gradually integrate it into our broader life story instead of remaining trapped in its raw immediacy. We can begin to say “this happened to me” and with it comes the subtle peace that storytelling offers – not erasure of pain, but the beginning of containing it in its own room.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I will be writing this and smiling the entire time, which is one of your amazing gifts to help people smile through tragedy. So thank you.

John Evans: Thank you, Liz. I appreciate you so much, and enjoy the rest of your walks.

---