Ten Years

Ten years ago today my world contracted, my links to so many events in my life diminished by one. My father died in the first hour of this day, September 13, 2000. His own life had been shrinking under the pressures of a failing heart and a clutch of related health problems.

I had spent the late afternoon and evening in his room at the hospital, talking to him and conferring with nurses and the doctor on duty, as efforts to stabilize his condition intensified. By ten o’clock, he seemed better, and Mother Shirley arrived prepared to spend the night with him. I went home.

At just before one o’clock, I awakened to a call from Shirley; Daddy was rapidly failing, the medical folks wanted permission to put him on life support. Shirley wanted my input and I told her whatever she decided was what should be done and I would be there as soon as possible.

He died shortly thereafter, and I arrived, supported by my beloved, who insisted on coming with me.  We shared the empty hour with Shirley, and arrangements were begun. We all went home.

So began my life without my father’s physical presence. But every day, I think of him at some random times, reminded by some event, sight, thought, catching myself thinking, “I must tell Daddy about this.” But I won’t ever do that again.

Selah, Fegi.

Ninety Years

Today would have marked my father’s 90th birthday. He died not quite five months into his 81st year, so this is the tenth anniversary of his birth for which he is absent, at least in the flesh. I think of him often, most days, especially on Sunday when, if I am observant, I follow the Prayers of the People in church, and speak his name (and my mother’s ) when the departed are remembered.

Tonight my beloved wife and I toasted Fegi with martinis, his favorite drink, which he mixed for himself each evening right up until his last night before transport to the hospital. He died five days later, despite the frantic efforts of nurses and doctors, leaving him a gaunt and yellowing icon of himself, surrounded by the detritus of spent syringes, ripped open envelopes of medical supplies applied in vain. His heart, swollen and congested, simply stopped beating.

Earlier, on that last evening as himself, I sat with him in between visits from doctors and nurses, he speaking when he could, I listening when I could, weakening consciousness on his part gradually stretching communication to breaking. I told him I loved him. He said he loved me. His attention wandered to the window overlooking the river beyond the hospital. Nighttime lights of the parking garage, streetlights and the navigation buoys on the river, red, yellow and green glowed in the frame of the window. As he weakened, his hoarse voice mumbled something that sounded like “Christmas tree, Christmas tree” as he turned his head towards the window, mouth wide to catch another breath. I don’t know if that was what he meant to say, or what my strained imagination assigned as meaning to his words.

My mother, of his heart, a woman who did not birth me but had long since won my love, for her love of my father, her devotion to him, came in from work to take over the night shift, carrying pillow and blanket. She leaned over her husband, telling that so many people were asking after him, wishing for his recovery, and asked how he felt. Turning his collapsing face to her, he sighed, “Just fine.” He seemed stabilized, no longer  in a crisis, so we thought.  I left him with his wife of forty some years, gently stroking his thin hair. I went home to sleep, by the side of my beloved, whom he had come to love.

Shortly after one a.m., my cell phone rang, and in hurried words my mother haltingly said that things had gone downhill, that my father was going, and the medical staff wanted to know if he should be put on a breathing machine. I told her I was coming, and whatever she felt best was what I felt best. We arrived to find that events had moved on beyond our decisions, and  my father’s yellowing form, face and open mouth raised to the ceiling, lay amongst the debris of the final few minutes of professional attentions.

There were tears, and arrangements, and a call on my cell phone to my youngest sister, the farthest away, the other calls to wait until the dawn had come. We all hugged, myself, my beloved and my mother (I no longer add ‘step’, she is more than that), and made our ways home.

Good night, again, Fegi, on your birthday.

Fading: The Greatest Generation

Two sixty-five year marks were reached this year, one broadly historic and social, another purely personal to me. A couple of months ago, I observed my sixty-fifth birthday. Today, it has been sixty-five years since the massive invasion of Europe set in motion the last eleven months of the Third Reich.

The first two months of my life were spent in a world consumed in a colossal struggle between Allied forces and the Nazi and Japanese military machines, with most of Europe and Asia dominated by our adversaries in each theatre. Millions of men and women, including my young father, were thousands of miles away from home, forged into armies and navies contending for the future of freedom as defined by the western democracies. Truly, these millions earned the later descriptive title of “The Greatest Generation.” They fought and died and suffered wounds, prevailed in battle and returned home to build lives and a peacetime rebirth of those nations their enemies sought to destroy.

This morning, newspapers and broadcast programs reported once more on the accomplishments of this band of brothers and sisters. As has been the case increasingly over the past decade or two, mention of the thinning ranks of living veterans sounded an elegiac note. The youngest of still living veterans from that cataclysmic war are in their early eighties. Stories this morning all told of how few were still able to gather at any distance from their homes, much less re-visit the far scenes of their struggles, or the foreign cemeteries where many of their comrades have lain since after the war.

A day will come when there shall no longer be any survivors of that war, as it came for veterans of World War I, and all the other wars before. Their names will become legend, their personal memories preserved only in their families and friends left behind, for a little while.

Selah, good and faithful servants – thank you all.

Fegi

Another birthday today, it would have been my father’s 89th. Nine years gone, we marked his birthday with a lunch, my mother, his cousin Upshur, my Barbara and I, reminiscing about Fegi. And about Miller, his cousin, who died shortly after his own 23rd birthday, on October 8, 1944.

I gave Upshur some letters sent from Miller to Fegi in the summer of 1944, first from England, then from France, as the Allied armies pushed eastward through France. Wry, joking young man’s words, telling amusing stories of England and a girl. More somber thoughts when Miller was deep in France.

We talked and laughed and remembered my father, and his lost cousin. Then we left the club and Barbara and I eventually went home, after a stop for provisions. It was time for the final ceremony of the day, mixing memorial martinis, my father’s favorite drink. I used to do this solo, but now we would share the moment. We toasted my father, sipped our martinis, and I introduced my father’s spirit to his daughter-in-law of two months’ official status. Daddy often told me how much he liked Barbara, and I think he is smiling somewhere now at how we finally observed our own ceremony, and tied ourselves to time and each other.

Happy Birthday, Fegi. We love you.

Travelling

Like Miss Emily, I never saw a moor, or unlike my father and his cousin Miller, war close and personal. This week I received the loan of some old papers of my father’s, letters from his cousin in France in 1944, and letters from home concerning Miller’s death. I have posted about the close relationship of the two cousins before.

Yesterday I spent hours going over fragile letters, darkened downsized copies of V-Mail messages and old newspaper clippings, all concerning the death and the mourning for Miller Smith. The V-Mails were from Miller to my father, who is addressed in the letters as “Pepe,” apparently a name used between the two cousins. No answer from my father survives. He saved Miller’s V-mails, in an envelope on which the haunting message is written, “Miller’s Last Letter. In the event I am unable to do so, please mail to…” and he gives the address of Aunt Emily, Miller’s mother. Daddy survived the war and filed  away the letters and his cover envelope, which I received on loan from my mother, his widow, yesterday. Miller’s story is a family possession, which we may share but not individually own.

The letters from Miller are full of youthful bravado and funny anecdotes, told with such detail and concentration that inescapably I think of the looming reality of danger and uncertainty that was assuaged for the time it took to write of lesser things.

The letters from Miller’s parents to my father after learning of their son’s death are painful to read. Such pain, and still strength to look forward, and expressions of such love for Fegi and recognition of the closeness to Miller that was now broken. I have read many stories of loss and sacrifice from that war, and felt something of the pain involved. But reading the words of naked grief of people I knew as the elders of my family, august and sources of calm authority – such an experience brings home so much more completely the feelings and uncertainty of that time.

I will copy the letters for myself, and return them. As I have grown older, I think more and more on those who came before me, whose lives touched and informed mine. We are all the sum of our parents and other family members, a shared history and a shared loss, as it was with Miller Smith in October of 1944.

Fegi and Miller

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death

My father was known from his first lisping attempts of speech as “Fegi,” since that was as close as his baby speech powers could come to his given name, “Felix.” My father was the first and last child my grandparents had. A year after Daddy was born, his first cousin Miller Smith, the first son of my Aunt Mimi and Uncle Blackwell, arrived. The next Smith would arrive nine years later, so Fegi and Miller became the next thing to brothers for the rest of their lives.

Constant visits between the two families (both resident in Chattanooga) kept the relationship close, with the two boys frequently sleeping over at one house or the other. I have a set of studio photographs of the two of them over twenty years, from the time when Daddy and Miller were two and one, respectively, until the last picture, in October of 1943, both in uniform, Navy for Daddy and Army for Miller, just before they both went overseas in WWII.