Traveling, old maps, telling old stories

Published: Thursday, March 6, 2014 at 4:22 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, March 6, 2014 at 4:22 p.m.

When people ask me why I'm following my father's World War II journey, I tell them, "I want to know why the war made the difference in his life, how it changed him from the boy he was before he left to the man who returned, to the father I knew for a short period before he died."

But the more I prepare for this trip, coming up in just a few weeks, and the more I talk with people — soldiers who were in the war, children of soldiers and even just those with an interest in our U.S. history — the more I realize that my answer — in fact, my quest — is pretty cliché.

Wars turn boys into men, girls into women. It's just a fact. Those who were there don't need to say how or why. Those like me who weren't will never understand.

It's been 45 years exactly since my father died. March 7, 1969, was a cold, rainy Friday. I was 14, my sister 17, and my brother 19 and in college. He hitchhiked home after a frantic call from my mother the day before to tell him things had gone terribly wrong with my father's routine surgery for ulcers. My brother made it home just in time to say goodbye.

In that way we have of blocking out moments too terrible to remember, I don't recall much about the days and weeks that followed. I remember listening to the Beatles' "Yesterday" over and over. I remember staying in my room as much as I could. I remember my mother telling us everything would eventually be all right, that we would get through it. I don't think any of us believed her.

On Easter Sunday a month later, on his way to church with his girlfriend, my brother's car was hit by an oncoming vehicle, totaling the car, breaking his wrist and injuring his girlfriend — now his wife — so severely she was in the hospital for weeks and weeks afterward.

My birthday fell two days after Easter, and it was the last thing anybody was thinking about that year, especially me. Odd that I remember now so clearly that birthday but remember nothing of it.

The years after my father's death were, in a word, awful. There's no other way to describe it. What's even more awful is that we didn't talk about it, not even with each other. We tried to go on with our lives as though nothing happened, when in fact the bottom had dropped out of our world. Ours was a house of sadness, a house heavy with grief.

It was only after my mother died that one of us mentioned my father. Soon it was as if a volcano had erupted, and we were spilling the lava of our individual stories all over the place, lava that would never, ever go back inside that volcano.

In the 45 years since his death, I've been somewhat obsessed with my father. In the 14 years since my mother's death, I've been obsessed with writing about him, with knowing him in a way I never did when he was alive. It's delicate work, because if I'm not careful, I'll make him into who I want him to be, not who he was.

Who he was, though, was a remarkably ordinary man. Middle management at a textile mill. Boy Scout leader. Methodist. Loved his children and his wife. Took care of his mother. Liked to take his youngest daughter fishing at the most obscure little ponds in the county. Everybody he ever met was his friend.

I believe I am like him in my creativity, in the fact that I always have a project going, just as he did, be it growing azaleas, learning to cane chairs or breaking up rocks with a flamethrower. My sister has his steadiness, his desire and ability to keep calm, even at the expense of his health. She also has his hazel eyes. My brother has "never met a stranger," as my mother used to say. Everybody he ever meets is his friend. He, like my father, has very little hair on top. The resemblance is sometimes striking.

When I look at them, I realize I don't need to travel to Europe or follow a World War II map to find my father. All I need to do is make a phone call or write an email or stand in the same room with them, and I'm talking, writing and being with him.

We've been on a lifelong journey together, a journey we're still on and will continue to travel for the duration of our lives.

These days when we talk about our father's death and the years that follow, we acknowledge that what we three experienced in those years is something we could never adequately describe to anyone else. As separate as we were, we were together in the awfulness, the loneliness, the inability to understand why.

When and if our children and grandchildren decide to walk the battlefields of those years to find out why they made such a difference, they'll discover that, like my father's war, it can only really be understood by those of us who lived it. Those who didn't may have their own stories of grief, but they'll never understand ours.

I don't know, really, why we're walking this World War II map, what we hope to learn that we don't already know. Why do we ever rewalk the maps of difficult times, circling and circling the details?

We're trying to understand something larger than ourselves. It's as simple — and as complicated — as that.



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