“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 