My father died 53 years ago on January 26, 1971. I was 18. When I reached the age he was when he died, I scheduled a cardiac scan. I don't know what I expected to find. My father's heart broke in ways that cannot be measured.
I'm thinking about the bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine and Haiti and I'm thinking about my father, because, I believe, it was another war — different century, other young men with guns — that unraveled his life and led to his death.
My father had one brother. I never met him, but his shadow hung over my life. My uncle was, by all accounts, kinder and more responsible than my father. My grandmother says he would come home after a date and sit with her on the porch, telling her all about it. I doubt anyone was still awake when my father came rolling in.
My uncle graduated from Texas A&M. My father ran bootleg whiskey along the farm-to-market roads of the Texas panhandle. My uncle enlisted during World War II and went into the army as an officer. My father had a military deferment as a farmer, but, after his brother shipped off to Europe and combat, my father enlisted, too. He joined the Navy as a seaman third class, went to training and promptly sent a one-line telegraph to my mother. It read, "Betty, come get me."
My uncle was part of the Allied invasion of Italy. He died during the Po Valley campaign. The soldiers who made the long journey to my grandparents' house in Tulia, Texas, told them this story: My uncle and his men were in a foxhole. An Axis soldier threw in a grenade, which exploded, wounding my uncle and many of his men. My uncle, the survivors said, wouldn't let the medics tend to him or evacuate him until all the other wounded under his command had been seen to. By the time his turn came, my uncle had bled to death.
He died on April 17, 1945. Hitler would die less than two weeks later. The war in Europe would end on May 8, 1945. Three weeks and my uncle might have gone home, back to the farm and Musick Produce and Farm Supply, with the Purina checkerboard sign out front.
My mother always said he died "one day after the war in Europe ended." It's as if she could not help but heap absurdity upon grief. He not only died young and far from home in a country to which he had no ties of history or kinship, but, in her telling, he died as a casualty in a war that no longer was.
My father? He recalled sitting on deck on the night of April 12, 1945, weeping at the news of President Roosevelt's death. He said he'd never heard of Harry Truman. He said couldn't imagine any president but FDR. He said he was afraid. He never spoke of his brother's death.
My father was still on his ship in the San Francisco harbor when news of the second death arrived. He was waiting to be shipped out for the invasion of mainland Japan. Instead, he was sent home. He went home to wage a solitary war, a war he would not survive.
My father never fired a gun in battle. He never, to my knowledge, killed a man. He just killed himself. I can attest to that, because I watched it happen. It was a slow death, a 25-year-long re-enactment of his brother's bleeding out.
My father bled in.
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