I hope everyone had a nice Memorial Day holiday. Did you have a chance to honor anyone? As most of us know this is the day we commemorate the men and women from the United States who died while in the military. It first became a holiday to honor both the Confederate and Union soldiers that died in the Civil War but after World War I it included American casualties in any war.
It is also the day that I celebrate the veterans. I applaud them as they pass by during the parades. I go to the cemeteries and watch the ceremonies. This year my town honored a young soldier that had fought in Iraq and won many medals, but was actually killed while on leave back here in the States.
I also honor my Dad. He was a veteran of World War II and died in the 1980s. For many years now I have gone to clean his gravesite on the Saturday before the holiday. He has two stones, one at his head, and one that was installed by the military at his feet. I rake the area, clip the grass around the stones, and weed and edge the dirt and grass around them. After that I wash the stones to make them shine for when my Mother arrives on Monday morning to place a single red rose on the plot.
This year my boy Max joined me. He was fascinated by what I was doing and immediately joined in. He is 8 years old and my Father never had the pleasure of meeting him. This didn’t stop my boy from honoring his Grandfather. Towards the end of our work I realized I had forgotten something to clean the stones with. Without a second thought Max took off his tee shirt and rubbed them both down. It amazes me sometimes the initiative he shows at such a young age.
As we worked I told Max stories about his Granddad.
Dad, his brother, and their father all were in World War II. My grandfather served in the south pacific while his sons were in Europe. Dad was a prisoner of war camp guard before joining the army air corps (the precursor to the air force). He loved to fly and parachute. When I was my son’s age he would take me out to Orange Massachusetts where there was an airfield. We would sit on the side of the road and watch the jumpers falling out of the sky.
After the war he got married, worked, and played hard. He was an extreme skier, parachutist, hunter, and boater. He gave all of this up when a friend ended up in a body cast for a year from a skiing accident. In those days there wasn’t any insurance and he wouldn’t be able to afford supporting a wife and a half a dozen kids if he got hurt.
He was a school teacher who also worked several part time jobs to keep food on the table. And he loved kids. If he could have, he would have had a dozen. As it was he had 5 of us; and along with our mother, a couple of cousins, a grandmother, and a grandaunt he had his work cut out for him.
In 1980 he developed throat cancer. He had been a heavy smoker for years so his doctors weren’t surprised. To combat his illness they buried gold nuggets into his throat so that they could give him radiation and that seemed to work.
For 5 years he appeared to have recovered but at the same time he was unable to stop smoking. And then in the end it was discovered that the cancer had spread throughout his body. It was time for chemotherapy. This time he lost his hair and wore a wig from then on. He began to waste away and still he could not stop smoking. He used to joke about losing his teeth. He could actually take them out of his mouth with the root intact and then place them back in. When questioned about the cigarettes he would shrug and say that he had lived a good long life.
In the spring of 1985 I found and put an offer on a house. Dad cosigned the purchase and sales agreement with me. I had to keep leaving the real estate office at the time because I kept coughing uncontrollably. I later found I had walking pneumonia. I recovered but Dad kept getting sicker and sicker. At the final signing I went to the office alone and signed the papers. My Dad was not able to travel then so the agent brought them to his house so he could sign them too. She actually guided his hand as he wrote his name.
After she left he couldn’t even function. My brother and I put him in a chair and carried him out to the car while my mother towed his oxygen tank behind us. After we placed both him and the tank into the car we drove to the hospital down in Boston. After putting him to bed my Mother placed on the table the usual bowl of M&Ms that my Dad always kept for the nurses during his stays here. Not long afterward he was loaded up with morphine and entered a drug coma. This was Saturday, on Tuesday the doctors recommended we take him off of life support.
The doctors were amazed that he fought to stay alive even in his coma. On Wednesday morning I went to work. I just couldn’t imagine there would ever be a time when my Dad wouldn’t be around. But part way through the morning I left the office and went to see him. I took the elevator up to his floor and waited for the door to open. At the very moment the door opened my family was standing on the other side waiting to go home. I missed his death.
The death certificate said “cause of death: pneumonia.”
It took two years for me to finally mourn his death. In 1987 I was in Jamaica with my brother. Late one night I was lying on the beach and it finally hit me that he was gone and I wept until the early morning. I didn’t go to his grave for 9 years after he died. I don’t know if I blamed him or me for his death but I had dreams constantly of the doctors finding a cure and using it to revive him.
In 1994 I finally visited him at his grave and I have been going several times a year ever since. And on Saturday Max and I performed our yearly ritual of cleaning his grave as we honored my Dad for all that he did for his country and for his family.
