“We are all replaceable.” The Daily Stoic grabs my attention with this subject line. I may read the email, but those words take me back to November 22, 1963. I had turned 12 on September 15th of the same year, on the day four little girls died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
When I think about that time in my life and I put it up against a lovely eighth grade girl standing next to me yesterday during an assembly who said, “We can be really bad sometimes, Ms. Emerson,” talking about her and her peers and their treatment of their teachers, I am humbled. The world is a difficult place—always, and the years when we are first coming to terms with that pose huge challenges.
It was a Friday, the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I had stayed home from school, sick with a cold or some other ailment. My father was downstairs, had not gone in to his office for some reason; it was about 10:30 and I had come downstairs.
Dad was sitting in the den with our black and white television turned low as the voice of Walter Cronkite murmured. I heard him call out to my mother, “Marylou,” but she was in the basement, so I came instead. In the grainy footage I could see the car, the toppled President, the panic of those in Dallas surrounding the car in the aftermath of shots.
And I stayed there with my father until Walter Kronkite announced his death to the nation. (I rewatch it now, and it brings me to tears—still.) The event elone would have been enough to rock my 12-year-old world, but this revered newscaster’s break with his traditional bedrock stoic delivery rattled me.
For two years I had worried about nuclear war; this was when the Cold War was hot! I was a child whose parents openly discussed politics before me and encouraged our reading everything. And then there was—of course—that black and white box that brought it into our house in unprecedented ways.
When I asked my father on that day in November what would happen, would everything fall apart now that the President had been assassinated, he turned off the television, faced me and said, “Patricia, don’t worry. No one is irreplaceable.” I know we followed it with conversation and that my mom joined us at some point—I tended to be the high-maintenance, dramatic child of their six—but whatever followed, those words consoled me. They are what remains.
Those words in a subject line this morning still console, but they bring their corollary, too: Everyone is replaceable. We move forward, even from seemingly insurmountable loss.
Jump off; Find Wings 
I remember everything about that day and your post makes the memories come back in a wave of sadness and worry about the future. I often think of that day as the “beginning” of an era of brutal killings that continues to this day.
I felt badly when I went so dark. The conversation with that eighth grader actually gave me hope! I don’t know what happened. Thanks for reading.
We don’t like to think of ourselves as being replaceable, but the truth is, we are. I remember that day as well. I was in school, a catholic school, and although we knew something was going on the nuns didn’t tell us. How they found out I have no idea.
It’s both sobering and comforting to reflect on how we are all replaceable. Thanks for this thought-provoking piece!
It turned darker than I’d intended. Thanks for reading.
I came along a little later but recall fallout shelter signs in the church and my parents discussing bombings, that our location amid numerous military bases and our proximity to D.C. would make us a first choice. Terrifying concepts to a child, what humans do do one another. Your final lines, however, are uplifting – I love the hope and truth in them.
Thanks, Fran.
This is a slice that brought me to some less public moments, but the reminder about impermanence is important. Thank you for your slice
And we all have those moments. I, too, am selective here. That is so much what the writer does—as much what to leave out as to include.
We are reading The Watsons Go to Birmingham and will be on this scene next week. They are always so shocked that this event actually happened. The one event I will always remember the exact moment in time is 9/11. I think this is one that made me realize that everyone is replaceable.
When I used to teach the Watsons with my seventh graders as part of an interdisciplinary civil rights study, I’d tell them how this event barely registered until I saw it on the news. It was my birthday, after all. Thanks for reading!