Echoes that remain

For the most part, the subtropical zone in which we Texans live has four distinct climate patterns during the course of 365 days. We plan our wardrobes and activities, adjusting to nature as it obediently defers to Earth’s tilt on its annual trip around the Sun. Spring, summer, winter, and fall bring reminders that the world is still spinning.

The season of death, however, makes the world stop on a dime.

Our wardrobes become colorless. Activities turn into robotic motions. Nothing can warm us because there is a constant chill in the air. The season of death is not a calendar page we can turn.

On a bulletin board in a classroom many years ago was a certain teacher’s favorite quotation. She would post all sorts of keepsakes and reminders on this particular display: spirit ribbons, football programs, graduation announcements, basketball articles, candid Polaroids taken just for fun, notes from students, yearbook photos, tardy slips—anything that brought a smile in remembrance of a child who had sat in that classroom.

Throughout the course of a long teaching career, small funeral programs were also taped to that board. One would have been too many. Illness, accidents, depression, and fate came for several students before they had the chance to enjoy all the seasons of life.

This week the teacher took out the folded poster she had stored after retiring. Just in the past eight months, three more young lives had become echoes. It was time to reflect on the joys and sorrows of that bulletin board menagerie and sit with the passage of time.

Most of those students’ smiling faces remain in orbit today; far too many dwell in heavenly constellations.

Today, I stood graveside again. A few parents in attendance were reliving their own child's death but somehowshowedupforthe mother and father who now join them in that black hole.

The writer of Ecclesiastes told us that for everything there is a season. So did Pete Seeger when he wrote there was a time to every purpose under Heaven. These words may ring hollow, not hallow, during the perennial season of death. But their spiritually poetic phrases are meant to prepare us for the inevitable—even when it is an unspeakable loss.

“…voices of the past which cannot come again, yet God forbid that I should lose the echoes that remain.”

Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.