Memorial Day
The family I think of on Memorial Day started with a visit to Don, my hospice patient, at his senior residence. I find him finishing his lunch. “What did you have?” I ask. “L.O.K,” he tells me. At my quizzical look, he tells me, “Lord Only Knows” and I laugh out loud.
When his daughter Rose comes, she has award winning patience with him, and the same warm smile I see in the pictures of her mother. The approaching loss of her father reminds her of another loss. “I was sitting on my couch in front of the fireplace, last Christmas Eve,” she tells me, “and there was a knock on my door.”
The newspaper stories about the war and roadside bombs come to brutal life as I listen to her. The Christmas Eve knock on the door comes from two men in uniform, the sight every military family dreads. Her son Mike was killed on Christmas Eve in Iraq. They stumble through a funeral mass here, and then a memorial service held by his unit, out of state. “I feel like we buried that child so many times,” she says. “At the end I was so tired.”
As Don gets closer to dying, Rose is there more often. I watch for her car with the “Gold Star Family” license plate, the distinction given to families who lose someone in combat. When it’s there, Rose is there, too.
She tells me more about her son. Sitting in the peace of the room, the story comes with different details this time. Mike was married briefly, and it didn't work out. Because of the timing of the divorce, when Mike dies, the Army calls the young ex-wife first.
Her father, drunk, calls Rose and her husband, rambling and spewing expletives. Her husband can't understand anything he’s saying, except that Mike is dead. Rose runs upstairs to the computer and frantically, crazily hits the buttons, searching for the emergency number they've been given. She finds it and is screaming her questions into the phone when she looks out the window. A white sedan turns the corner onto their street and moves slowly up the block, as if looking for a house number. She watches the car driving through the snow until it stops in front of her house, and two men get out and come toward the porch.
Pausing in her story, she looks at me in her dad’s quiet room and asks “Are you crying?”
“I am.”
“You're sweet to cry at my story,” she tells me.
Her story is also a bigger story, giving me a window in the sacrifices of so many military families. The memorial services for her son, all over the country, and the uncontainable grief of his young soldier friends. The break in the family circle, and the burden on her other son to be happy enough for both of them. The weight she and her husband will always carry. The photo of her son on the mantel that will never change, even when new pictures come along.
How do you repair a break like that in your family, in your plans, in your spirit, she asks me one day. She knows better than I do. My only answer, then and now, is “L.O.K.”
Peace to all this Memorial Day, and grace to every family carrying this burden of grief.
-- Mary Austin, stainedglassinthecity.com