She felt like she was going to throw up.

Chemistry teacher Jo King felt nauseous, like her stomach was tying itself into one gigantic, anxious knot. She was struggling to breathe. She felt like she would vomit.

King looked up at the hundreds of athletes that he coached — football players, volleyball players and track and country runners — who stood on the church’s grand balcony in their jerseys. Their faces were blurry from the tears in her eyes, but she could tell they were crying. 

Five days before his funeral, Bruce King, her husband, was alive and healthy. Paramedics said he had no significant health issues.

King lost her husband 10 years ago due to a heart attack. King, who was hired at the school at the start of this year, said she copes with difficult emotions by teaching chemistry and trying to grant a good high school experience and future life to her students: all kinds of people.

“I am super passionate about chemistry,” King said. “I worked really hard to get to the point I am at today. I hadn’t planned on teaching this year, but I’m here now, and I’ve realized it’s not too late to make an impact.”

King said her motivation has been to help people since she was a little kid. When she was young, she had ambitions to work in law enforcement and help civilians, specifically by becoming a cop. 

As she grew older, she struggled with mental health issues. She said she grew up feeling like she didn’t have anyone to talk to. This, paired with her interest in science, motivated her to major in psychology, aspiring to be a therapist to help people conquer their mental health issues.

Alongside her psychology degree, she graduated with a masters in religion, a minor in chemistry and a minor in teaching. She realized the therapist field wasn’t for her, though, when she began speaking with people and felt it took too much of an emotional toll on her. So, she began to help people in a different way: working as a chemistry teacher at her local high school.

“I did not ever expect I’d work in the chemistry field in general, let alone as a teacher,” King said. “But I’m glad I found this path; I love it.” 

One of King’s former students, Mario Matthew Hernandez, had her as his chemistry teacher when he was a sophomore in the 1996-97 school year. She called him “Skittles” when he said “you can call me whatever.”

During the time he was in her class, Hernandez’s dad was diagnosed with cancer. Over the course of the class and school year, he and King developed a bond akin to a therapist and patient.

”She understood something else was going on [at home,]” Hernandez said. “She would always check up on me and make sure everything was OK.”

At the end of his sophomore year, he asked King if he could be her teacher’s aide in his upcoming years of high school, and she agreed. She let him teach her class a handful of times, and he helped grade papers. In his senior year of high school, his father passed away from cancer

Now he teaches a high school culinary class and implements methods of teaching that he learned from shadowing King decades earlier.

One of King’s earliest jobs as a high school chemistry teacher was when she began working at Centennial High School in 1998. 

A few weeks into her job at Centennial, she realized there was a technical issue with a piece of equipment in her classroom. She asked how to contact the technician, and was told that he would take several months to respond. She was told she could go to the athletic trainer instead, so she did.

Then and there, she met her husband, the athletics trainer at Centennial High School.

“I remember [when I first] saw him,” King said. “It was love at first sight. The moment we looked into each others’ eyes, I knew he was the one.”

The couple’s friends describe their personalities identically: both quiet, reserved, and diligent workers who had a knack for helping those around them. They worked at Centennial for a few years, but quickly decided they wanted a change of pace.

They moved to Plano together. King got a job as a chemistry teacher at Plano West High School, and worked there for a little over a decade.

In 2012, King was walking through the main hallway at Plano West to pick up her lunch, but the doors to access the hallway to her classroom were locked. Frustrated, she walked around and through a staff-accessible shortcut. When she walked past, the secretary broke the news. 

“I didn’t know how to feel,” King said. “It didn’t feel real. He showed zero signs of health issues. He was thin, athletic and healthy. I asked the doctors how or why it happened, and they didn’t even know.”

She was given very little information about her husband’s condition. She said the minutes leading up to her getting any information at all were filled with unsoothable anxiety. When she got to the hospital, he was nowhere to be seen. Those anxious minutes of waiting for the ambulance to arrive felt like hours.

Then, she received the news.

Earlier, he was alone in his training room, working out with his teaching aide. They had been working out for an hour when his aide left to use the restroom. When she came back, he had fallen to the floor, clutching his chest. She dialed 911 and began performing CPR, but he didn’t regain consciousness. 

“They had everything,” King said. “His assistant was a CPR trainer. He had the best of care — it just wasn’t enough.”

By the time the ambulance got to the school, the paramedics couldn’t drive to the hospital. They needed to focus on reviving him. They were able to for a split second, but he fell unconscious again. Two days later, they pulled him off life support, and he was pronounced dead.

Since the incident, King said she has been doing her best to pull her life together and find a new purpose.

”[My husband’s passing] destroyed my life,” King said. “It’s hard for me to feel whole again when the path of my life was erased so suddenly. My dreams, goals and ambitions just evaporated. I didn’t know where to go from there.”

One week after the incident, she returned back to work, but nothing felt the same. The superintendent would come by to check in on her, offering time off and asking her if she’s OK. 

While in some cases, grief will resolve itself over time, in others, it may not. Debilitating, never-ending cases of loss, referred to in the medical world as “complicated grief,” make it possible — and common — for grief to never end. That doesn’t mean it can’t be coped with, though, and that’s what she has been doing for the last 12 years.

“I’ve always been really good at compartmentalization,” King said. “[Back then,] I didn’t have the time to recover. I had to keep on going, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since — kept on going.”

Alongside her grief, King has had her own health issues throughout her life. She’s had multiple heart surgeries, five major concussions and multiple knee injuries. Her husband used to help with her knee injuries, but now she goes to a doctor. She had a surgery in early November that addressed that issue in her heart. 

“My husband and I’s heart issues are completely different,” King said. “They’re so opposite — his heart beat too fast [in that moment], and mine won’t go fast enough.”

King has been teaching chemistry for over 40 years, and after a brief retirement, came back to teach at Hebron. She said she missed teaching chemistry and wanted to go back to her dedication in life. She said that at first, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to come back to teaching or not, but after meeting the staff, she was determined to work here.

“The staff has really gone out of their way to make me not only feel welcome, but supported, in a way most schools have not,” King said. “I’ve never seen a school so careful about making me feel welcome.”

King said she loves public schools because she has the ability to help out all kinds of people. Previously, she worked at a private academy, but quit soon after joining because she wanted to work with diverse students from varying backgrounds.

“All kinds of kids with all kinds of issues do well in her class,” her former paraprofessional Neena Kaushal said. “They come out with different personalities, and they start believing in themselves. The way she teaches changes the world.”

King said she intends to work at Hebron for a while, and help out the community in every way she can.

“Getting stressed is something that comes with every new school [you work at],” King said. “But the environment here is so welcoming, and I love this job because of the kids. That’s the reason I applied — I’m really looking forward to working with the kids and helping them learn.”