Never Forget

For those of you who were not yet born and yet had your lives touched for all time by this singular man, pause for a minute today to think what the world would have been like if MLK had not lived, had not died. Not wishing to dwell on his death, but on his life, I still cannot help but think of that day and the pain felt by myself and so many others around me. Forty years ago today I was impossibly young, sitting waiting for my college instructor husband at Virginia Union University, a majority black school in Richmond. The sights and sounds of that day still haunt me.

Robert F. Kennedy, delivering an extemporaneous eulogy to Martin Luther King, Jr., the evening of April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana, said,

“Aeschylus wrote: In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

These words, lacking “own,” have been used as one of the inscriptions at the Robert F. Kennedy gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery.

After hearing his words I went to the library and found the passage in Aeschylus and memorized it, like the young Kennedy had done at University. It has comforted me over the years through much tribulation, both personal and private. I hope it does so for you too in whatever sorrow you have in your life.