Palo Verde High School senior Stacy Dockery still gets a sudden rush of certainty when she passes Room 807 that language teacher Barbara Edwards is inside, waiting for a good joke or a quick hug.
"I still think if I peek in the window and make a funny face, Mrs. Edwards will be there and she'll just start giggling," Dockery said. "I have to remind myself every time that she's really gone."
Edwards, 58, died Sept. 11 when United Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. She was on leave from Palo Verde at the time, nursing a broken arm that had not healed properly after a car wreck the previous spring.
The broken arm had become a hidden blessing, said Gail Fahy, a close friend of Edwards' who runs the language program at Palo Verde. Edwards used the leave to take a trip East to visit family and friends, including some she hadn't seen in years, Fahy said. Edwards was on a flight to Los Angeles with two of those friends, Bud and Dee Flagg of Virginia.
"In a way, she got to say goodbye," Fahy said.
Fahy can see the positive side of the situation, but for some students, there is no positive. Some said the pain of losing Edwards was intensified by her violent death.
"It scared me to imagine her sitting in her seat, crying and saying, 'Why is this happening?' " Dockery said. "I hate seeing the video of the Pentagon on fire, knowing that was her plane."
Alexis Riback, also a senior, said it was several months before she was able to to focus on the possibility of a more peaceful end.
"She traveling with her friends, so I hope they were talking to each other and laughing and they never even knew," Riback said.
There are happier memories for the students to dwell on: Edwards dressed as a package of McDonald's french fries for Halloween, complete with the real thing sprinkled in her white-blond hair; after-school meetings of the International Club, which she sponsored; her laughing attempts to teach the Spanish students basic phrases in German.
Palo Verde junior Sonja Johansen remembers her first encounter with Edwards -- a first-year French class in 1999.
"I went home and told my mother I had an angel for a teacher," Johansen said. "I saw her blond hair and blue eyes and her smile, and I knew she was someone incredibly special."
Edwards didn't just teach languages, she taught her students about the importance of being decent and kind, Johansen said.
Dockery agreed, noting that she has tried to widen her own circle of friends and get to know classmates she might otherwise have walked past in the hallways.
"You have to value your family and friends today and take every opportunity to know new people," Dockery said. "You can't look at people and prejudge them, or think you already know them. Mrs. Edwards was friends with everybody."
Soon Palo Verde students will have a place to go to remember Edwards -- a bench is being built in her memory at the school's soccer field, on the spot she always stood to cheer on the home team. There is also a college scholarship in her name that school officials say they hope to continue for at least 15 years.
Edwards would have been proud to know about the scholarship, her stepfather, Jack van der Baan, said.
Edwards' mother, Lissy van der Baan, cannot yet talk publicly about her daughter, he said. But the family has taken tremendous comfort from Las Vegas' response and from Edwards' friends around the nation and the world, van der Baan said.
Edwards is also survived by three sons -- Mike, Doug and Scott -- and two grandchildren.
"There has been such an outpouring of love," van der Baan said from his home in Hopkins, Mich. "It made us realize that she accomplished a lot in her short life, and that makes us feel better."
The family is slowly moving toward acceptance, although the process has been hampered by the public nature of the tragedy, van der Baan said.
"We know our daughter is in a better place and someday we'll be with her again," he said. "Her boys are doing fairly well, given the circumstances, but this first anniversary is a very hard time for us."
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