When I give talks in the community about how Spokane has changed in the past 50 years, I mention the summer that Robert “Bob” Haggerty got glasses. When he returned to school in the fall, it was the biggest change in all our young lives, and we talked about it for weeks.

At St. Charles grade school, and in schools throughout Spokane in the early 1960s, families were more rooted, less transient. Three years ago, at my 30th high school reunion, I explained to Bob how I tell the story of his new glasses, and he laughed, remembering well all the attention those glasses garnered.

That evening, Bob talked proudly about his wife, Julia, and their two daughters, Meghan and Sarah. He downplayed how successful he had become in his international insurance career.

Bob, who lived in Shoreline, Wash., died suddenly Nov. 13. When I saw his photo in our obituary section, I felt sadness, because we’ve lost another St. Charles boy.

I looked through my grade school class pictures this week and realized that we boomers, raised with vaccinations and penicillin, were the first generation who were not exposed to a lot of early death. Few families in the generations before ours remained untouched by the death of a child or young adult.

We boomers are now surrounded by more and more mortality. But when a childhood friend like Bob dies, we don’t picture him as a 50-something adult, we remember him in his navy blue St. Charles sweater, returning to school in the fall, feeling shy about wearing those thick black glasses.

After reading Bob’s obituary, I called Wanna Lee Bartol, mother to another sweet St. Charles boy, Christopher Bartol. I knew she had long ago figured out how gratitude can share space with grief.

In 1982, Chris, an Army helicopter pilot who was to leave for Korea the next day, intervened in a fight in a movie theater parking lot in Bellevue and was shot to death, along with his younger brother Mark.

I interviewed Wanna Lee several years ago and she expressed little bitterness about losing her two precious boys. Then, more tragedy visited her family. In 2001, her 15-year-old granddaughter, Sara, died of cancer. And two years ago, Wanna Lee lost her only remaining son, George, who died from a brain tumor.

“The grieving process goes on forever,” Wanna Lee, 78, told me. “But I am so thankful they were the kind of kids they were. They were good kids. They worked hard. I’m thankful that I had them for as long as I did.”

Wanna Lee goes to daily Mass at Assumption Catholic Church on Spokane’s North Side. She keeps busy with quilting, china painting and Red Hat clubs. She feels grateful for her four daughters, 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She has forgiven the young man who shot her boys to death in the parking lot.

She also feels thankful for the mysteries of life. She married her husband, Jack, when both were just 16.

“We’ve been married 62 years,” she said. “I’m amazed myself it lasted, but we’re still both grateful we’ve made it.”

Wanna Lee and I traded St. Charles stories. She remembered the day that Leonard Erickson, our grade school’s troubled genius, Elmer’s-glued Christopher’s coat inside of his own, perhaps some sort of science experiment. Wanna Lee’s laugh danced through the phone lines.

Humor helps, she told me, and then she said, “I am grateful to be on the planet, yes I am. You grow through grief. I wake up every morning and thank God for another day of life. But I don’t really have any words of wisdom.”

How wrong she is about the wisdom part. I hung up the phone, grateful for Wanna Lee’s words. And grateful for Bob Haggerty and the story of his new glasses, a story I will continue to tell, in thanksgiving for Bob and all the other St. Charles boys gone from us too soon.