Nun's touching tale spread via e-mail
MORRIS, Minn. (AP) - With a stroke on a keyboard, the electronic letter
snaked through cyberspace, bouncing from one corner of the globe to
another before reaching Sandy Kudenov's computer.
It was a chain e-mail promising good fortune to recipients who passed it
on - and Mrs. Kudenov almost dismissed it as junk mail.
But it had come from a friend who encouraged her to read this tale about a
nun, a soldier and a piece of paper.
So she did, and when finished she thought: Everybody should read this.
Hitting the send button in her Livermore, Calif., home she forwarded it
along and became one more link in the Internet chain of thousands -
perhaps millions - sharing this recounting of a transforming act of kindness.
Yet even as she sent it she wondered: Is the story true?
The same question has been asked again and again in letters reaching this
Minnesota farming town of 5,500 from around the United States and far
away. From Bombay, India. From the USS Kitty Hawk in the Pacific.
Is it true?
The reply from Sister Helen Mrosla, the local Franciscan nun and teacher
at the center of the chain-letter story: Yes, it is.
"After teaching for 35 years ... I know that I'll never have another Mark
Eklund in any of my classes," begins Sister Mrosla's story, words she
wrote a decade ago that someone unknown had since put on the Internet.
Mark was the kind of student teachers never forget - a precocious, polite
kid who was always drawing attention without really trying.
Mark met Sister Mrosla (pronounced Mer-oh-sluh) in 1959 in her
third-grade classroom at St. Mary's School.
He tested her with his shenanigans. Once she sent him to the cloakroom
for misbehaving and he climbed out the window of the two-story school,
up the fire escape and onto the roof.
Then there was the chatter.
"Mark talked incessantly," she wrote. "I had to remind him again and again
of the classroom rule that talking without permission was not acceptable.
What impressed me so much was his sincere response every time I had to
correct him for misbehaving: 'Thank you for correcting me, Sister.'
"One day my patience was growing quite thin when Mark talked once too
often, and that was when I made the mistake most novice teachers make.
... I looked at Mark and said, 'Mark, if you say one more word, I am
going to tape your mouth shut.' It wasn't 10 seconds later when Chuck
(Lesmeister, a classmate) blurted out, 'Mark is talking again."'
She was forced to follow through on her threat.
"The only way I could make it stick was by putting the tape on so that it
looked as if Mark had a big X over his mouth. ... I picked up the reading
book and glanced at Mark to see how he was doing. At that moment he
winked at me. That did it. I melted and started laughing. The entire class
cheered as I walked back to Mark's desk, removed the tape and
shrugged my shoulders."
No matter the punishment, at the end of every day Mark stopped at the
teacher's desk. "Good night, Sister. Thank you for teaching me," he would
say.
Sister Mrosla moved to junior high and she and Mark met again, in eighth
grade math class. "The same ol' Mark," she recalls fondly.
One Friday after a tough week of algebra, she sensed her students were
struggling and feeling dejected.
Put the math books away, she told them, and pull out a sheet of paper. On
every other line, she said, write the name of each student in class and next
to the name write a kind word - a sincere compliment.
That weekend she compiled the lists for each student on yellow legal-size
paper, adding her own compliment at the end.
She handed the papers back during the next class.
On Mark's paper, among other simple compliments, somebody had
written, "A great friend." His best friend, Chuck Lesmeister, was "fun to be
around." On Judy Holmes Swanson's list, someone noted she "smiles all
the time."
"No one ever said anything about the exercise after that class period,"
Sister Mrosla wrote in the letter on the Internet. "I never knew if they
discussed it with one another after class or if they mentioned it to their
parents. It didn't matter. The exercise accomplished what I hoped it would
- the students were happy with themselves and one another again."
Years passed. The schoolkids grew up. Life went on. Returning from a
vacation in August 1971, Sister Mrosla was met by her parents at the
Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. They were barely onto the highway when her
father cleared his throat, "as he usually did before saying something
important," she wrote.
"Mark was killed in Vietnam," he told her. "The funeral is tomorrow."
He had died in his sleep of a pulmonary and cerebral edema. He was 20.
Four months earlier, Mark had been sent to Vietnam, assigned to the
585th Transportation Company in Phu Bai, delivering supplies to
firebases.
His letters to family painted a safe picture, describing his work as a clerk
at a truck parts depot far from the shooting. But to friends, including Sister
Mrosla, he revealed fears of dying and frustration over what he perceived
as a fruitless war effort. He told his former teacher about lying in his bunk
listening to a firefight one night.
"He was scared to death from the shooting," Sister Mrosla said. "He'd
have nightmares about it. I remember telling him I was praying for him."
She filled her letters with stories about her students and how much they
were like his class.
Mourners at Mark's funeral lined the block around the red-brick
Assumption Church, second only to the town's grain elevator in height.
They filed up the stairs, into the sanctuary and past the open black casket.
Sister Mrosla was the last in line.
"The only thing I could think of or wanted to say at that moment was,
'Mark, I would give all of the masking tape in the world if only you would
talk to me,"' she wrote.
Lesmeister helped bear the casket, draped in a flag, to a hearse for the
five-block ride to the cemetery, where a soldier played "Taps." As it was
lowered into the ground, a soldier approached Sister Mrosla.
"Are you Mark's math teacher?" he asked. "He talked about you. You
may want to talk to his parents about his personal effects."
The Eklunds were waiting for the nun when she arrived at a reception at
the Lesmeister family farmhouse. Standing in the sunny kitchen, James
Eklund pulled out a wallet.
"We want to show you something. They found this on Mark when he was
killed. We thought you might recognize it," he said, gently taking out a
worn piece of paper that had been refolded many times and taped
together.
"I knew without looking at the writing," Sister Mrosla wrote, "that the
papers were the ones I had listed all of the good things each of his
classmates had said about Mark."
A few of Mark's school friends who were gathered around also
recognized the paper, and one by one they told her they still had theirs.
Lesmeister preserved his in his wedding album. Marilyn Lohr kept hers in
her diary. And like Mark, Jim Halbe had his with him in his wallet.
"That's when I finally sat down and cried ...," Sister Mrosla's e-mailed
letter continued. "He gave so much to all of us."
Nearly a decade ago, Sister Mrosla wrote about Mark and the list of
compliments for Proteus magazine, which had published a notice seeking
stories about education. It was reprinted by Reader's Digest.
But it wasn't until her words were put on the Internet that they gained a
global readership. Sister Mrosla is happy people are reading the story, but
unhappy it has become a chain letter promising good luck to recipients
who pass it on.
"It cheapens it somehow," she said, sipping hot chocolate during an
interview on a bitterly cold Minnesota day.
At 63, she still teaches. Now, it's college students who will one day be
teachers themselves. She tells them about the compliment list and the
reassurance it seemed to give to the once-impish pupil she'll never forget.
As the chain letter circulates, letters and telephone calls continue to come
in from folks wanting to know more. A pastor gave a sermon using the
story as a lesson about kindness.
And three strangers have sent the nun rubbings of Mark's name from the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington D.C.
"... As thousands and thousands visit the Vietnam memorial each year, I
hope they will know that Mark Eklund is not just another name on the
wall," she wrote in the Internet letter.
And she concluded: "Good night, Mark. Thank you for letting me teach
you."
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