Omagh, Enniskillen

              The fact that I’ve been with students so much of this time is wearing on me tonight. But I’ve left all of them and their thirteen buddies from Oakgrove, downstairs while I sit here with Barbara, cups of tea at hand, my ears too plugged up from the bus to take sudden screeching.

              Today we rode to Omagh and met Kat, whose father, Michael Gallagher, was the central figure of a movie my class had watched back at Roosevelt. Kat’s brother, Aiden, was one of 29 killed in a bomb left by the Real IRA to disrupt the Good Friday Agreement just then passed. We read poems and left remembrances and daffodils at the memorial, and did so too at a traffic circle in Enniskillen.

              There, John Harken quoted Rev. David Cupples, a minister who had to lead a service immediately after what was also called Inneskillen’s Poppy Day Massacre in 1987: "Faith is a refusal to panic." John has turned the other words, "All contact leaves a trace," into this one he gives at morning assembly: Our contact is never neutral—we either help or we harm. 

              On that day in 1987, Cupples also gave this prayer: May your life be the triumph of love over hate, hope over despair, and life over death.