Everyone Deserves To Come Home
A Story for Memorial Day
My grandpa was one of four boys, born in 1927. I got to know him only in snapshots and quick visits throughout my childhood; my grandparents bounced around from state to state. His wife-my grandmother, was never satisfied or safe within her own body to settle for very long. He spent the last of his years back home in New Jersey, dying much too young from a life spent bleeding out for his country, his community, and his family in silence.
I’ve been fed pieces of his story through my Dad- both of us still a little dwarfed in the limelight of the towering Dutchman with the twinkling blue eyes. There is a faded print of Grandpa leaning up against the hood of his car, 1956, his hair slicked back, his white tee rolled at the sleeves, and a cigarette hanging from his left hand. No one knows where it is now. I only have his service photo, where his 16-year-old eyes shone with naive unknowing.
Somehow, he had convinced his mother to allow him to lie on his paperwork so he could follow his older brother John into the Second Great War. Her picture now hangs in the recesses of my formal dining room- her facial expression stoic, standing in the yard. I wonder if she knew one of her boys wouldn’t come home. I wonder if all the mothers knew.
My grandpa was recovering from shrapnel wounds throughout his legs and thighs in Lake Lucern after his tour in Palermo decimated half of the 88th Blue Devils when they told him John was gone. He would return home to his mother as the only survivor. With metal in his muscles, in a place that didn’t speak his language, in a body hardly out of puberty, he denied the Purple Heart offered him.
Most likely, because his own was broken.
I wonder if it was the pain of his brother’s name that kept him from visiting us often- my childhood home in the same town where he was a child before the war took that from him. Our split-level white house with the black shutters planted at the hill of the street that bore his last name. And mine. There wasn’t a corner in town that didn’t have an engraved monument. Not a church without a stained glass dedication to the courage of his brother, John. Two streets shaped directionals I gave to teenage drivers in the dark, dropping me off at home after curfew. “Make a left onto John Place, then another left onto Vanderberg Place.” Pause. “Yes, I live at the top of the street that has my last name.” We honor the dead in an attempt to keep them alive, while the living learn how to walk while dead.
When my world imploded and I found myself alone as an adult with two babies and no idea what to do, I went home. His home. To the streets he would walk as a police officer, the diner he used to drown his scrambled eggs in ketchup, the playground where a tank still sits. I thought of the casualties of war and how my grandpa lived with the dead until he died himself. I felt him walk with me, every labored step toward a future I couldn’t see. I needed his steady hand on my back, like when he taught me how to ride a bike. His gentle coaxing. His reassuring laughter.
I often struggle with Memorial Day weekend and what it means, then and now. But I never struggle with this: people’s stories need to be told. Our sense of place, of language, of home- they are all the stories we tell. They are what we come home to.
And everyone, dead or alive, deserves to come home.