Lost children will forever haunt Uvalde

Sometimes there are secrets that no one is intending to keep. They just stay hidden.

My family moved to San Antonio from Dallas when I was 6 years old. Every summer, sometimes other times, we’d go back to Dallas. We’d always stay with relatives, usually my mother’s youngest sister.

There was no other child my age, so sometimes I just roamed around the house and the neighborhood, and one time I was in my aunt’s garage, rummaging through boxes. I found a newspaper clipping about a young man I’d never heard of. It was an obituary of a young man in a uniform.

Now, my family talked endlessly about the people they’d known in their youth. But this boy, all they remembered was, “Oh, yeah, he died in Korea.”

They recalled vaguely he’d left behind a girlfriend. But he had vanished from their lives. And I thought that was weird. They had gone on with their lives, they knew intimately who had dated and married whom. But not him. Not that poor dead young boy.

But most lives lost prematurely are going to linger in memories for years. Years.

Yes, I’m going to talk about Uvalde. My parents’ generation kind of forgot about that young man who died too young to leave an impression, although I’d bet anything that wasn’t true of his own family. I’m sure every holiday and special occasion was diminished. I’m sure he was the last thing his parents thought of before they fell asleep at night.

Uvalde. Those 19 children and two teachers. They are not going to be forgotten as long as one family member lives. Every wedding, every holiday, people are going to think their loved one should have been here. She could have been the flower girl. He could have been the ring bearer. He could have been the best man. She could have been the bride.

Those lost children will haunt Uvalde for as long as any of us will live. There will be shrines to them in parents’ and grandparents’ living rooms.

Years ago, I was in Galveston when a woman rushed up and showed me a photo on her cellphone of her and her friend, standing down the hall. In between them was a boy, about 10 years old, wearing one of those flat newsboy caps and — I swear — knickers. The woman said, “There was no boy in that picture.”

Galveston is supposed to be one of the most haunted places in America because of the 1900 hurricane that wiped out more than 6,000 people in minutes. That’s what creates ghosts.

But you don’t have to believe in ghosts to know that Uvalde is going to be haunted forever. A hurricane is an act of nature. An 18-year-old able to buy an automatic weapon with an extended clip is human idiocy.