The letters and texts and emails have been constant since the day Brenda Stroman passed, written testaments to the great friend she was to so many.
They came from friends and fellow teachers but mostly from former and current students of Mary Lin Elementary, just off North Avenue in Candler Park.
“She was there every day leading me,” through the grief felt from the loss of my father, a 13-year-old boy wrote to Stroman’s husband, Anthony.
“He wanted me to know that she brought him through the most difficult time of his life,” Anthony Stroman said just days after the funeral at the Body of Christ Church International USA in College Park.
That might seem like a small thing even for a school guidance counselor, but people say that Brenda Stroman was that kind of friend to everyone she met and most especially at Mary Lin, where the 60-year-old worked the last 15 years of her life.
She didn’t have any children of her own, but she loved every student like they were her own.
“She was a bundle of love,” Anthony Stroman said. “I used to call her sunshine because that’s what she brought to everybody.”
To read our newspages, sometimes it feels like the sun has closed up shop and gone home, left us to wrestle alone with the darkness. And then someone like Susan Feinberg writes and any bit of confidence in the decency of humanity you’ve lost is restored.
Feinberg’s grandchildren have attended Mary Lin Elementary School, and she wanted me to know about Stroman and her impact on the school but also on her family, personally.
When Feinberg’s son-in-law died suddenly in 2009, her granddaughter, now almost 14, was a second-grader at Mary Lin.
“Brenda reached out to her the moment she returned to school,” Feinberg said. “We never asked for assistance. Brenda just stepped up to the plate. She made herself available to our granddaughter and encouraged her to come and talk to her whenever she was feeling sad.”
Trying to understand and manage new emotions like grief can be hard enough for an adult, so imagine being a child trying to work her way through that maze. We give little thought to the job that school counselors do during such times.
I’ve thought of little else since I sat down and talked with Feinberg and Mary Lin’s principal, Sharyn Briscoe. With all the chaos happening in our world — mass shootings, bullying, terrorism — school counselors like Stroman can have a strong and positive impact on our children’s emotional well-being.
I read a study recently that showed our emotional intelligence is declining. Globally, it said, people are more emotionally volatile, less self-motivated and less compassionate.
The role of school counselor has evolved over the years, demanding more than ensuring that college-bound students are prepared for academic life after high school. A school counselor today is charged with helping students focus not only on academics and career awareness but their social and personal development as well.
That’s what Stroman did. She came early and she stayed late. She performed duties that weren’t in her job description, hosting career fairs and creating the school safety plan and manning the bus detail. She modeled for her students and Mary Lin’s staff what it was to love freely and with compassion, never speaking an unkindness to any of them.
“She was just everywhere, very hands-on,” said Briscoe, principal at Mary Lin. “She did individual and small group counseling with the kids who needed it, but she was also concerned about character development. She talked to them about being kind, making positive choices and responses to each other.
“She gave up her lunch period almost every single day to eat with kids who needed to talk to her. She’d let them come to her office and play in their sand box. I always said the children that gave others difficulty were the ones she embraced the most. Even when she was sick, she was home calling us, asking about the students.”
But Stroman never asked anything for herself.
Folk at Mary Lin knew she was ill, but they never knew the details or how sick she’d become until she couldn’t come to work late last year.
That’s when, after a brief hiatus, the endometrial cancer in her body started roaring back, her husband said.
“She was getting better,” Anthony Stroman said. “Her bloodwork improved, but then it took a turn about eight months ago.”
Brenda was planning to return after the holidays to finish out what would’ve been her final year at Mary Lin, but that wouldn’t be. She passed April 7 and was buried a week later.
Last week, her Mary Lin family was still trying to process her loss, still mourning.
“She left such a gaping hole,” Briscoe said.
But maybe not.
I got the feeling talking to Briscoe and Feinberg that Brenda Stroman understood that the best parts of this life are free. Air is free. Sunshine is free. And most importantly, love is free and Stroman gave it in abundance.
With any luck, what she poured into the students and staff at Mary Lin will flow freely to those of us she left behind.
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