A story unfolds

I have been spending random hours here and there at my parents home slowly cleaning and sorting for an unknown inevitable outcome. Should he come home, it will be to a clean and cleared-of-obstacles space to maneuver wheelchair/walker. Should his permanent residence be the nursing home, we will have begun the difficult process of prepping the house for sale.

While putting some things away, I came across a box of love letters my mother had received from my Dad, that I decided to take home to read. At first, I felt guilty but as his words from sixty five years ago crossed the thresh-hold of my understanding of my father, I was thankful I had.

I gained a window into a man, in his late twenties at the end of the war, so desperately in love with a girl that he wrote her every day while he worked out a way to bring her home as his bride. This man who had a difficult time showing any of his children emotion or affection, had at one time, the capacity to call his sweetheart "Precious" and "Sugar" and "My Love." What happened to this boy?

I tread lightly when asking him about those days. His memory is failing and his lover for nearly seventy years, is incarcerated in the same nursing home a floor below and yet, he cannot bear to see her every day. It pains him that her memory of him has vanished, while his remains. I understand for I too, have a hard time visiting a woman with no reference to me.

My father and I were never particularly close, but in the last few weeks, I have begun to understand him as a boy, and as a man, trapped and desperate and lonely. And now, since reading his letters, I have begun to recognize him as once we all were; naive and hopeful with the promise of the whole world stretched out before us, a blank slate ripe for developing. He has a story, and his story is part of mine. I cannot know who I am until I understand who he was and how he came to be.