B19 wrote:
You seem to be coping well, and although insensitive comments from siblings can be very upsetting, in a time of grief, it's good to see you sailing over them and savouring meaningful things.
We have two little momentoes of the my maternal grandfather's time in Egypt and the bloodbath of Gallipoli from WW1.
The most meaningful of them has come down to me. It is a sterling silver square locket with thick sides on a silver chain, which was a gift before he went to the amphitheatre of the war. It is especially precious to me because of the dent in it caused by a Turkish bullet. The locket probably saved his life. I wouldn't have existed but for this gift to him. He came home in one piece, and had a reasonably good life, unlike many of those returned soldiers who suffered terribly.
How precious these things are. The other is a tooled leather wallet with beautiful engraving and colouring showing the pyramids, which he bought in Egypt. Let nobody, siblings or anyone else, rain on the meaningfulness of these things; I hope you find much comfort in yours always, these tangibles connections and symbols that we have which have such important meaningfulness for us. I have passed the wallet on to my eldest grandson.
When I wear and hold the locket, there are moments of connection I feel with him, as an ancestor and a decent human being who did his best. I think those men lived with a great deal of survivor guilt, though they were not responsible for the bloodbath of their compatriots. They hated war. Really really hated it, and many refused to take part in military parades afterwards. It sickened them. Churchill was no hero to them. Many became lifelong pacifists.
I hope that things go well finalising your mother's estate, despite your siblings' previous unkindnesses. It was you that was there for her in her final chapter, not them. Hold onto that. It was you who walked the walk, while they talked the talk.
Yep, I am doing better. Thanks! My father rarely spoke about his time at Mendlesham, England. But, he spoke glowingly about his crew mates. They had trained as a 10-member B-24 crew, only to get transferred to a 9-member B-17 crew. Command didn't want one lone crewman to learn anew with a different crew, so they required that one crewman stay behind for most flights. Since my father was the only married crewman, they promised to leave him behind as often as they could. He spent time prepping each flight for them, and donating blood while they were on assignment in case they needed his Type O Negative (universal) life-saving blood when they returned.
He also spoke about the "chowhound" flights where he dropped crates of food and supplies behind allied lines. Curious about which flights he might have joined, I researched several flights where it was likely that he was aboard.
Most tellingly, he met a friend of his third wife in the 1980s who grew up as a child in Rouen, France. She mentioned that she couldn't understand why the United States would bomb her town and asked him point-blank why "they would do that." When he mentioned that he knew about Rouen, she asked how he could have known about it.
Being painfully honest, he admitted that he had been among the bomb flights and that they were instructed to bomb only the train yards. She told him in no uncertain terms that her neighborhood had been bombed, too. He apologized to her and
never mentioned his service again.
I guess that is why he hid the throat mic. Your locket is similar to my throat mic. They both saw battles that we could and should never understand.
10 Feb 2018, 5:08 pm
