On Loss
It was my last week on study abroad in England, and as with the last of anything, I wanted to make it count. Therefore I was determined to enjoy the play we were seeing at the National Theatre in London, A Matter of Life and Death, even though the plot summary sounded dubious to me—“It is 1945. A young airman jumps to certain death from his burning aircraft. His last words are to a girl he has never met: I love you, June. You are life and I am leaving you.” My skepticism seemed to be confirmed as the curtains opened to a blue-hued stage full of rolling hospital beds with nurses and soldiers pushing them around in a sexy modern dance. There was no meaning that I could discern. In a portable circular stage, an imitation soft rock band with dreadlocks played the back-up music. The staging clearly said “manipulative art that’s gone too far in trying to be innovative.”
But then the music stopped. The beds were rearranged to represent a World War II aircraft with a single young man at the controls. Peter Carter knows his plane is going to crash and says his final goodbyes to June, a young woman volunteering as a radio operator, then jumps from the plane with no parachute. But he doesn’t die from his fall because the angel sent to fetch him to judgment got lost in the English fog. By the most miraculous of coincidences and some harnessed acrobatics through fog-machine smoke, he wakes up to find himself in the exact town where June lives. Even though it was predictable, I was swept up in the wave of joy as the two first met on a sandy beach. When Peter’s “conductor” angel returns to correct his mistake, Peter protests and ends up in a heavenly court battling for his life and newfound love. The audience became the witnesses to a court that examined the fairness and unfairness of life and death and love. Why should Peter be given the chance for life when so many other soldiers have died? Why should he get a choice when no one else does?
Because of this question, the judge decides to let chance determine Peter’s destiny. I hung over the edge of my balcony seat as a front-row audience member was asked to flip the penny that would decide the soldier’s fate. It came up tails—Peter was dead. I sat back in my seat, not sure what to think. My heart was crushed as June wept over Peter’s body on the stage, but what bothered me was that it didn’t have to end that way. It could have ended differently.
As I walked out of the theater, John, our program director, pulled me aside and told me that my dad had called before the play. This didn’t seem strange, as my parents, brother, and maternal grandmother were in London to pick me up from the trip, and I was supposed to meet up with them the next day. My cell phone didn’t work in Europe, so our only communication had to be through John’s program phone. He said that apparently my parents were having some troubles with their debit cards in England—none of the banks recognized them as having any money—so I needed to withdraw some cash for them. I nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“There’s something else.” John looked hesitant as though trying to figure how best to put what he had to say next. “He said that your grandfather died.”
“Oh,” I said. I almost said, “Which one?” but then I remembered that my mother’s father had died my senior year of high school. It still hadn’t settled in my mind that not all four of my grandparents were around—a fact I had been bizarrely proud of in elementary school, as though a whole, intact family were an expensive possession.
“Are you going to be okay?” said John, with an awkward look of concern.
But I didn’t really feel very broken up over the pronouncement. I felt guilty for feeling nothing, but I told myself that this was because I didn’t know Grandpa Muir very well, at least before Alzheimer’s made it impossible for anyone to know him. I saw my grandparents a lot more than most children do. My mom and dad grew up only three blocks apart. Both of my sets of grandparents were still living in those homes, only fifteen minutes away from where we’ve lived since I was three. I put pressure on myself as a child not to act as though I preferred my mother’s family to my dad’s, which I did, because it seemed unfair to judge the value of my family on anything so shallow as personal preferences.
My dad’s mom, Gale, taught piano lessons. Mom would drag my siblings and me over there once a week to demonstrate our miserable lack of practice, which Grandma would politely pretend not to notice. While one of us tried to fake our way through a lesson, the rest of us flopped on the sofas in the living room to watch cable TV, a luxury we didn’t have at home because Mom thought it would turn our brains to mush. All things considered, it made piano lessons almost bearable. But then Grandpa would come from down the hall. His walk was slightly uneven, not enough to really notice unless you had seen it a lot of times.
“Who’s this cutie?” he would say, looking at me in surprise as if he had never seen me before and had no idea why I was watching TV from his brown, mossy recliner. His voice had the tone of a great aunt who might pinch your cheeks, which sounded odd coming from a tall man in a Mr. Rogers type outfit, only with grease stains and leather slippers instead of running shoes.
I would try not to roll my eyes or act as if this was anything but normal. “I’m Liz. I’m your granddaughter.” I always came off sounding slightly exasperated, no matter how hard I tried. Of course, it didn’t matter since he would forget we had this conversation at all, but I wanted to make an effort.
“Weeeeell,” he would say in sincere surprise. “You’re such a pretty girl. Better keep those boys off of you.” This was always the first subject he brought up with any girl he met, even my mother. And I say met literally, since each time we saw him, we had to be reintroduced. His Alzheimer’s changed little over the course of my life. In my early childhood, I think he might have remembered who my mother was, and when I was in high school, he couldn’t recognize my father, his youngest son.
He never knew me, I never knew him, which gave me an excuse to shrug off my lack of grief at his death. But somehow it broke my heart that I wasn’t heartbroken about it. I had cried when the soldier lost his coin toss at the end of the play—a fictional character—and yet I had no tears for my own flesh and blood.
Like Peter Carter, my grandfather Milton Muir fought in World War II. The only time I ever heard his story was on a Fourth of July that happened to fall on a Sunday when I was about fifteen. The bishop had asked my grandpa to talk about his experience in sacrament meeting as part of a patriotic program dedicated to the soldiers currently fighting in Iraq.
As he took his place behind the podium, Grandpa was amazingly lucid, stringing together a story as I’d never heard him do in normal conversation. In his “home on the farm in Alpine” style, he told the complacent Sunday crowd of how he’d been accidentally hit by a rifle shot the night before the actual attack—what we all knew from the current war news as “friendly fire.” He’d missed the D-Day attack that was to be his first battle and was instead put in a hospital, paralyzed and assured that he’d never walk again. He told how through sheer determination he’d forced himself out of bed each day, retraining his muscles to walk against the doctor’s diagnosis. I’d taken his walking for granted, though my dad had sometimes mentioned the bullet wound in his father’s neck when trying to explain to us what was wrong with Grandpa’s memory, how his brain no longer stored recent information like the day of the week, even though he could still teach us his favorite math tricks.
My head jerked out of my contemplation of my ingratitude when I realized Grandpa was again recounting that night before D-Day. His story became jumbled, as though he didn’t know where to end. Like a skipping record, at a certain point in his hospitalization, the congregation would suddenly find itself back before he was wounded. He would tell of the shot in the dark tent again, his story a smooth loop of injury. The transition was almost imperceptible, only suddenly we’d realize he was being shot again, lying down again in the hospital, struggling to move a leg again. I’m sure Grandpa would have told his story until doomsday. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a bishop actually get up and ask someone to stop speaking. Rising from his chair, he placed his hand gently on Grandpa’s shoulder and moved him kindly but firmly aside. Through the microphone, the bishop ended the story cycle, thanking my grandfather and all other military men for their service to their country and their God. As the bishop assisted him back to his seat on the speakers’ side of the podium, I cringed slightly on the bench, my teenage heart squirming at the embarrassment Grandpa could not feel.
* * *
In London two days after the play, our group was scheduled to visit the Imperial War Museum. Normally a war museum wouldn’t have meant a lot to me, not being much into guns and submarines, but right now every exhibit was filled with memories of my grandfather; or rather, a void where memories should have been. As I walked through the museum, I felt the distinct lack of knowing exactly who my grandfather was, or even what he did. I went straight to the basement D-Day exhibit wanting to look for mention of his regiment beside red-ribboned medals and wireless communication radios, but none of the numbers and names meant anything to me: First Airborne Division, Fifth Ranger Division, Fourth Infantry Division. Though I knew I had once read the name of his unit, I couldn’t even remember if my grandfather had been in the army or the navy. Was he supposed to land on Utah Beach, named after his home state, or Omaha, or Gold?
I was conscious of his absence from the exhibit, and though I’m sure someone somewhere knows where Grandpa served, this information felt irretrievable. I felt the distinct loss of a story that passed away with him, that neither I nor anyone else would be able to hear again. It relieved me that I could at last feel some tenderness connected with his death, even if it was only my own encounter with the perpetual tragedy of civilization: as the older generation dies, the experiences of their decades are lost. No one will ever know the story of those decades, only surmise based on paper records and artifacts.
Last spring, my dad had tried to commission my writing abilities to construct a piece about Grandpa’s war experience for a Veteran’s Day story contest for a local newspaper. He handed me a sixty-page printed document, which represented the history of Grandpa’s regiment in World War II. After a bit of resistance, I began to leaf through the document. My grandfather’s war experience was summed up in two or three sentences on one of the first few pages—it mentions that “Milt” was shot in an accident the night before the planned attack, an event that severely demoralized the whole unit. There it was, in two sentences, the event that had shaped his entire life. His story was not one of the “noble and great ones.” His story was brief and, in the final view of things, unimportant. No one would ever care to catalog it because it hadn’t made a difference.
This thought made me feel cold and dizzy, drained my desire to stand, so I sat down on the stairs to watch the introductory movie to the D-Day exhibit. As the black and white camo-clad figures piled out of the landing craft onto the beaches, I looked into each of their faces and thought, “That one could be my grandfather and I would not know it.” Illogical, since he never actually landed, but the faces still taunted me with who they might be. I had someone that close to me my whole life and yet I never took the time to find out about him, about the war; I treated his attempts to tell me as a nuisance that interrupted my time to watch Cartoon Network. I knew nothing about him other than what I observed, which wasn’t a lot. Had I inherited anything from him? No money, wealth, or fame. A name, but no story. I had lost my chance to find out what legacy I had been born into.
I suppose this is grief, in a funny kind of way. Most people in mourning regret the future, the lack of that person in all the days of their life yet to be. Instead, what I miss is the past.
* * *
My father went home for Grandpa’s funeral—a three-day weekend trip with two trans-Atlantic flights and his father’s eulogy to write. When he came back, my family and I, along with my best friend Joni, traveled across the English Channel to stay for a week in Paris. On Sunday, my dad decided that now it was more important than ever to make the four-hour trek out to see the Normandy beaches and the memorial museum at Caen.
The memorial in Caen is a strange place: a museum with the world’s only exhibit dedicated to Nobel Peace Prize winners, yet the main attraction is a walk-through history of the wars of the Twentieth Century. Its frankness and honesty about war are refreshing. The museum labels talk objectively (as far as that’s possible) about what each side did in war in three languages, English, French, and German. Because of its international nature, there’s no attempt to paint the Americans as heroes, the English as stalwart bulldogs, or the Germans as demons. Simple facts only of what happened, who won, who lost. It’s strange as an American to walk through a museum where Nazi artifacts aren’t backlit in red with Hitler’s speeches or war marches playing over the speaker system. The displays weren’t separated by country like the Imperial War Museum with one wing for Nazi artifacts and one for British. The uniforms stood side by side, British, French, German, American, as though the boundaries of nations didn’t matter. I remembered watching The Last Samurai with my boyfriend before leaving on the trip. During the final battle scene where all the samurai in Japan are about to be eliminated by the country’s modern army, he remarked that the scene was “even sadder because it was Japanese fighting Japanese.” In my head, then as now facing these exhibits, I wondered why that mattered. Wasn’t all war equally tragic, because it was people killing people?
I was just beginning to enter the Cold War exhibit when my dad rushed us all off to go catch a showing of the museum’s feature film, a fifteen-minute documentary consisting only of actual D-Day footage with no voiceovers or explanation. Its depiction of war was so different from the fanciful bomber plane constructed from hospital beds in A Matter of Life and Death. As the cameras of the on-location journalists panned across the men waiting onboard the boats and tanks, I was amazed at how young their faces looked staring silently at the camera. Perhaps it was the first time I had seen such footage since I myself passed draft age. A scripture from Alma would not leave my head: “for they were all of them very young” (Alma 56:46). I had always thought that Helaman had written that scripture with pride in his stripling warriors, amazed that these sons could be so young yet accomplish so much with such great faith. Now his statement was not a triumph, but a hollow tragedy. There was nothing to be proud of in making young men go through something like war. The words echoed against the digitally projected faces of young men: “for they were all of them very young.”
At last, the waiting before the attack ended, and the film flashed back and forth between gray scenes of the invasion, men, boys pouring out of amphibious vehicles and dropping flat on the beach, their bodies spread out long—dead or alive?—and color shots of the beaches today, blue water looking almost tropical with white sand bars. I never thought I had any illusions about the nature of war until I saw these boys running on the beach like ants, or children at some sort of perverse beach holiday. They were so small, just pawns in the overall battle. They had no control; how could they have any? “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
I wanted to know their names. I wanted to know their history. Honestly, I felt an urge to run to the nearest library, to read every book and rent every documentary I could about these boys, so that their story would not be lost. It felt like an overwhelming burden: how could I possibly know them all? Could anyone? Each soldier was human, with a story. I couldn’t remember my grandfather’s story in any detail; who did? Who remembered the story of each boy pouring out of the landing craft?
* * *
We were standing in a cemetery. It didn’t quite feel like a cemetery, though. Instead of the usual mishmash of gravestones of various shapes and heights, almost 10,000 two foot high white crosses stood in orderly rows. I felt like I was standing in the middle of graph paper. I walked down the row with my head turned sideways, watching the crosses come in a diagonal wave, line up in perfect symmetry for a fleeting moment, then echo away again. It was raining, softly, a gray rain, enough to dim the sun and eliminate the harsh shadows that should be here because it was noon. I was glad the gravestones didn’t cast shadows. It made them seem less foreboding; instead it looked enigmatic. The water puddled on the white marble arms of each cross, a perfect square ocean, each exactly the same depth.
We were in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. It’s located on the coast, overlooking Omaha Beach. The beach looked just like the color video from the museum in Caen—almost-tropical, shallow blue water and white beaches. Only the gray from the rain tempered the image and made it feel sufficiently solemn. In this cemetery, there is a grave for every American soldier who died in France during World War II. The graves are laid out in a huge rectangular grid with an aisle up the center. At the top of this aisle is a large rectangular pool and then a huge semicircular sandstone monument.
At first approach, I didn’t see any names on the stone crosses; they were faceless like the soldiers they represented standing at uniformed attention, a story buried silently underneath. But walking around to the other side, Joni pointed out the names carved into each stone, white on white, almost invisible unless you got down to touch the name. Spontaneously, the six of us spread out to different rows and began reading the names off to each other.
“Arthur L. Arnold.”
“Donald F. Hendricks.”
“James R Coe.”
“Woodrow W. Coghill.”
My mom beckoned us over to one cross next to the central aisle surrounded by some bouquets and potted flowers. Bending down, I saw a plastic photo holder sticking out of one of the potted plants. Grasped by the white clip was a small wallet-size photo in sepia tones—a young man in a soldier’s uniform. Perhaps this picture was taken just before he left for battle in Europe, never to return. I thought of my grandfather’s grave in Salt Lake which I hadn’t yet seen. Had things been different, he might have been buried here instead, and this man in the dark sepia uniform might have been my grandfather instead. I wanted to cry for him but couldn’t. I stood up and felt the rain landing on my soldiers.
Suddenly band music began to play. I looked up and saw the American flag waving against the grey sky in the center of the monument. The tune was the national anthem. Around me in the cemetery, people stood up and paused to listen. In my row of graves, there were five of us. We stood without expression and without comment, feeling the solidarity of the others without actually seeing them: all of these random Americans remembering the losses of the past on a rainy Sunday. The connection was unplanned, yet meaningful. Strange that it meant more to commune with these strangers over loss than it had meant to spend time with the grandfather I had actually lost. But soon the music would stop and we would each drift back to our own graves, saying nothing about it.
I looked down to the cross in front of me: “Here rests in honored glory a Comrade in Arms, known but to God.”
Liz Busby and her husband George usually live in Provo, Utah, but will be residing in Seattle this summer. They are expecting their first child in October. Liz graduated in April with a BA in English from Brigham Young University. In her spare time, Liz enjoys knitting, blogging, and collecting random facts from educational television.
