![\"Normandy](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/06\/American_military_cemetery_2003.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not often given to nostalgia, but sometimes it happens. \u00a0And for some reason, as it turns out, I\u2019m in a bit of a nostalgic mood today.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s easy \u2014 for me anyhow; maybe others don\u2019t think this way \u2014 for me to somehow imagine that people I haven\u2019t seen for many years are still going on with their lives pretty much unchanged. \u00a0Unlike me, in my imagination my seventeen- and eighteen-year-old high school classmates are still young. \u00a0They don\u2019t change, even though I know, rationally, that they\u2019ve aged. \u00a0That many of them are probably retired by now, and that some of them are almost certainly dead.<\/p>\n
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But today, somehow, it hit me yet again, as if I didn\u2019t already rationally know it, that the adults who molded me as a boy and as a young man are all dead. \u00a0Or that, if they\u2019re not dead, they\u2019re old enough that they almost certainly can\u2019t be doing well (except for one notable exception)<\/a>. \u00a0Even the ones who were relatively young, in their thirties and forties, are \u2014 if they\u2019re still alive at all \u2014 in advanced old age.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Why did I start thinking along these lines today? \u00a0I don\u2019t really know. \u00a0I suddenly felt impelled to look up a former bishop of mine in southern California, wondering whether I could find anything about him. \u00a0I hadn\u2019t seen him in many decades, and I was shocked to discover that he had died late last November, and that he had been living not too terribly far from where my wife and I live. \u00a0I wish that I had known that, and that I had gone to see him.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n So I looked for the man who, as president of the Los Angeles California East Stake, had sent me on my mission. \u00a0In fact, for almost my entire childhood, the concept of \u201cstake president\u201d and this particular man were inseparable in my mind. \u00a0Unsurprisingly, he\u2019s gone as well. \u00a0He died just a couple of months before my father, back in 2003.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The men with whom I worked at the family construction company and who were almost uncles to me, men like\u00a0Tino Beltran<\/a>\u00a0and his brother\u00a0Frank,<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Joe Esparza<\/a>, and our company mechanic,\u00a0Red Faler<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 they\u2019ve all passed away, too.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This all illustrates in a very acute way the brief and transitory character of our lives here, and it reminds me, once more, of the achingly beautiful setting by\u00a0\u0112riks E\u0161envalds\u00a0of Sara Teasdale\u2019s poem \u201cOnly in Sleep,\u201d performed here by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n