Writer in the Forest

Chapter 27

Today Dad talked about the war. He never used to talk about it until we got him a tile at the Washington State War Memorial. A Patriot Who Served with Courage, that’s what you are to me, Dad. Now, thanks to me, he opened up and relived the pain.

In his wheelchair beside his bed in the nursing home, he told me the worst memory for him was hunkering down in a trench in Germany with all his buddies. He made me hear the deafening belch of the guns, the screeching, ear-piercing scream of bombs and human pain. Dad told me when it was all over; he was the only one in the bunker left alive.

Toward the end of the war, young Private First Class Harry rolled through town on a tank, in the land where his mother was born. I wonder what it felt like when his worlds collided. He would have relatives here somewhere, was he shooting at them?

He told me there was a sniper in a bombed out building. His buddy, “the Italian guy”, whirled the 50mm gun around and shot out a window that had somehow survived. The shooting stopped. Dad and the others climbed through the window to make sure the sniper was dead, and found only a woman with a rifle in her hands. She was blown to pieces, said Dad, but they could tell she was alone and about 85 years old.

There was a photograph of the young soldier Harry—a picture his mother kept on the old radio, touching for luck while offering a wordless but heartfelt prayer for his safe return. Dad was nineteen–a grinning and proud military man who bore a resemblance to the Dad I know. At nineteen he still had hair. All hope and pride, he was. Ready to march off to war and save the world, not foreseeing the heartache and fear that would lay him low for decades.

Young Harry could not have imagined me. Did Young Harry dream of children? How strange that I, someone he had yet to meet when this photograph was taken, would someday be the one trying to save him from the ravages of heart and kidney disease.

Dad was so weak. They had to pull him up to sit and eat, and they had to pack pillows all around him or he’d fall over. His head lolled. I asked him how he was today and he said he was pretty good. The unsinkable Harry.

Dad was too weak to swallow. Friday night they did a chest X-ray to see if he had pneumonia, but it was heart failure again. He was too weak to cough up the fluid in his lungs and he choked on his unswallowed food.

Nearly sixty years after young Harry survived the war, he died of heart and kidney disease. At 86 pounds, all he talked about when he was strong enough to speak, was love. He loved me, my brother, my husband, the grandkids. He thought he heard Mom outside talking to the nurses, but I had to tell him Mom couldn’t make it but sent her love.

Before he died, tears rolled down his face, and he said, “I wish I was your real Dad.” I broke down, too, and said from my soul, “You are my real Dad.”