A friend called me last Friday morning to see if I had heard that one of our former classmates had died.

Christa Voss, a member of the Joplin High School class of ’94, was killed on June 9 when a motorist plowed her SUV into a group of cyclists riding on the shoulder of Highway 51 near Sand Springs, Okla. Christa and another cyclist were killed, and a third was injured.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol report indicated that alcohol may have been a factor in causing the driver of the SUV to swerve into the path of the cyclists.

I didn’t really know Christa, other than having shared a class with her once or twice in high school. I do remember that she seemed like a nice person, though.

Reading the obit that ran in our June 12 paper, it was easy to see that she really was an exceptional individual: a biology professor at Tulsa Community College who previously worked for the Tulsa Zoo; a marathon runner; a member of an amateur bicycle racing team; someone who went skydiving and took bagpipe lessons simply for the fun of it.

But the type of person she grew into was really no surprise to me, having sat in her father’s classroom for four years in high school.

Looking back, I’m not really sure why I signed up for Latin. Maybe I just assumed that since it was a dead language and I would have no need to ever use it outside of class, how hard could it be?

I found out the answer to that question as I struggled to correctly conjugate verbs, translate passages of text and (sometimes unsuccessfully) hold on to a B in the class.

A number of classmates who started out that first year dropped it in favor of Spanish or French, but what kept me coming back each year was Gerald Voss.

Mr. Voss was more than just a teacher — he was a Teacher with a capital “T,” one of those all-too-rare educators who was as concerned about the type of adults his students would become as he was the letter grade they were making in his class. Maybe even more so.

Much of our time was spent translating selections from works such as “The Aeneid,” which traced the adventures of the heroic Aeneus that would eventually lead to the founding of Rome.

Often, Mr. Voss would use these stories as a springboard for weightier discussions:

What does it mean to take on responsibilities? What does it mean to live up to those responsibilities?

What is love? Can you truly love somebody and make them happy if you haven’t first figured out how to be happy on your own?

What is a family? What does it mean to be a good citizen?

There was the occasional roll of the eyes and knowing “Here we go again” looks exchanged by those in his class when he would begin one of these tangents (especially if they happened to fall on the one day each year when he wore a toga). I ate it up, though. These weren’t things that were talked about in my other classes, or even at home.

There have been moments during the 15 years since graduation when I have thought back to those discussions and realized the importance of what he was trying to tell us.

Sometime during my sophomore year, I stuck around for a few minutes after class to see if Mr. Voss could translate a Latin motto contained in a book I had just finished reading — Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”

The slightly garbled phrase, inscribed by Capt. Gus McCrae on his sign for the Hat Creek Cattle Company, was “Uva uvam vivendo varia fit.”

Translated literally, it’s a proverb about how a grape changes. We talked about its possible meanings within the context of the novel, and how — if taken metaphorically — the word “man” could be substituted for “grape.”

What wound up inscribed in the paperback copy that still sits on my bookshelf was: “A man becomes a man by enduring certain things.”

It’s not terribly profound, but it’s a phrase that I’ve carried with me over the years through everything from the death of loved ones to dealing with a child whose diaper seemingly exploded in the middle of the night.

As the father of two now, I can’t fathom having to endure the loss of a child, or even think of something to say that might make such a senseless tragedy begin to make sense.

But from what I’ve gathered, Christa’s was a life well lived — and the importance of such a life was at the root of so many of those off-topic lessons that Mr. Voss offered to his students.

They’re likely lessons that she learned well, because she had something so much more valuable than just a teacher: she had a father to guide the way.

Scott Meeker is the features editor for The Joplin Globe.