I wrote in the spring last year about my niece who hadn’t gotten a flu shot, caught the flu, and ended up in the ICU for a very long time with sepsis, fighting for her life.
Emily was at one point the youngest-ever head of the piano teachers’ association in her state–she’s good.
After the amputations that helped save her life she had to learn how to be a piano teacher with no fingertips.
She made this video to teach other teachers what she’d learned from the experience about how to relate to her students. Who don’t know how they’ll ever be able to do what the teachers do like the teachers do, who see it from a very different viewpoint, who question themselves. How to see and meet them where they are.
With hands back to being the size of your typical five-year-old’s, as she put it, but that can’t quite land in that space back there between the black keys anymore, she tells her students it’s okay when they make mistakes because she does, too. But making music feels great.
And if you want to skip right over to 36:25 in the video, you can go see how she does.