Teachers

I had just heard the news of his death that morning. He had played hide-and-seek for a while with the bad bug, the same voracious virus that lives within many, and makes them die. 

He was not even forty years old. Bright, kind, and life-loving, he taught us, his students, small and big, simple and boggling, sweet and bitter lessons. He was gone now, and the question ‘why?’ kept bugging me as I walked to the grave, I mean, to the grove in the park where I go to find solitude and solace. 

On that day, I hoped to find answers to the ‘why?’ question. I heard the question again, this time asked by a boy no taller than three feet, not older than four years, who used a fallen tree branch as a walking stick.

‘Why?’ he asked, tilting his face up to meet the eyes of the wise woman who, walking alongside him, hopefully had an answer. 

She replied: ‘It’s just time to go, and the stick needs to stay here.’ I did not find this to be a satisfactory response to such an important inquiry. 

The boy was not satisfied either, so he repeated the question, as he kept holding on to the stick: ‘But why?’ 

He was only satisfied, and skipped over the broken branch he left lying on the ground, upon hearing a better reply: ‘You’ll get another one where we’re going next.’

May that be the case, for the boy, for the teacher, for us all.