Dear Daddy,

It has been 50 years since you left this world suddenly. I cannot believe that it has been so long.

Memorial Day, the original Memorial Day, has more significance than the Monday Federal holiday that the US celebrates. Monday’s holiday is little more than a day off to shop and consume, because that is all we ever do in America now. According to sources, the first declared “Memorial Day” was May 30th, 1868–exactly 100 years to the day when you died. Now it has another 50 years added to its history. And I wish I could tell you that people no longer die in bloody combat or aerial bombing. It seems so much worse than before, with so many nations engaged in being ‘death merchants’, selling killing machines to other nations that have scores to settle within their borders as well as without.

Mass murder is sold by the minute even in today’s entertainment venues. What would you have made of it, having served in a real war?

Having faced Hitler’s madness 80+ years ago, what would you make of the world leaders today: the dangerous buffoonery of Donald Trump? The mass murder of Syrians by their own President in prisons that mimic the Nazi death camps? All the nationalist baloney that you would recognize from before?

I wonder what life would have been if I had grown up with you still around, which would have meant having Mom stay at home to greet me when I got out of school each day. I truly became an orphan. I have felt very alone all these years, even when I know I have great friends…but no one special to live in my heart and be my best friend for all time. I joke often and say I will get married when I am certain all my prospective in-laws will be dead. But maybe being an independent unit, untroubled by family bickering or tensions, may have come at a heavy price.

I have your WWII letters to read, the only chance I get to know you as a fellow adult and not the 10 year old girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. Many times I have smiled at your writing, groaned at your spelling errors (seriously? You too? You didn’t always know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”??), and felt dismayed when you wrote that the German people ought to be exterminated entirely for the horrors revealed in the spring of 1945, in the revelation of the first concentration and POW camps liberated by the Allies. I grew up having a great deal of compassion, a desire to know as many of my fellow earthlings, and lucky enough to have a job with some overseas travel, and with the internet, the technological tools to travel virtually and get to understand other cultures. I had German clients whom I am glad were given a chance, in defeat, to prove that they were under an awful spell rather than innately evil in themselves.

What would you make of the world today? I wish I knew. I don’t know how much of your sensibilities are lurking under my skin, vs how much of you is in my siblings. They and I do not ever speak. Mercifully, Mom is still ticking along at nearly 93 years of age and we are able to talk now and again. She has told me some stories over the years that make me think I could guess what you would think of some of our achievements as the beings known as “the human race”. It seemed so dark in the spring of 1968, with riots against injustice, a war in Indochina that was grinding and humiliating, an assassination of a black man who proclaimed peace, and a week after you died, we lost another member of the Kennedy dynasty to a violent death. It was bad then but I don’t think it felt as hopeless as it sometimes feels now.

What would you have made of me, your last child? I have made so many bad decisions along with those good decisions. I think haunted by the spectre of a short life because of you, I may have chosen in haste to live for the day. I think you would still love me, however. On the other hand, I might have been very different with you there. Well, we often say these days, don’t dwell on the “woulda, coulda, shoulda”. That is where madness would lie.

Of late, I am drawn to a variety of causes that echo the turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s–the rise of fascists in our government, the growing inequality that has led to massive financial insecurity once again, the hatred voiced against other people who are just different. I wonder if you and I would have had good conversations about the state of the world. I am sure you would be heartbroken at the poisoning of the environment and the death of so much flora and fauna that was your life’s work. Mom told me you loved to teach ecology in the early 1960s, when it was not nearly as chic as it became decades later. I am afraid it is not taught much any longer. We are too busy either plundering the earth’s resources and consuming it all up for money, or struggling to stay out of our own version of “Hoovervilles”.

We throw people away as readily as we toss out a candy wrapper.

I have found a richness in befriending people from many places and especially those in war-torn Syria (or newly escaped from Syria). I have a beloved “brother”, Walid, with whom I have had wonderful conversations. He too lost a father at a young age, and I learned that in many Arabic / Islamic cultures, the loss of the father automatically makes children orphans, even though the mothers still live. I don’t think of it as being a heavy-handed, male dominance thing as I might have done in the past. The women are very strong there, like Mom has been, but fathers are the guides to all their children and their loss is profound. No man can replace a father.

Walid suggested that I should plant lily-of-the-valley on your grave so you will know I think of you; I had mentioned to him that it was your favorite flower. I am sorry that I have not been able to do so, but I hope to someday. I have a renewed sensibility of the world, of humanity, and of a kind of love that is more true than the romantic stuff and nonsense people talk about.

Maybe after 50 years of being, at turns, vulnerable and fiercely self-reliant and walled-off from others, I am learning to love as a child loves. Oh, I have a ways to go and it will never be the perfect child, but I am discovering an oasis of humanity in myself that seemed to have dried up before.

You didn’t mean to leave me here. You didn’t cause me to be unhappy. But I live the lyrics of Patti Smith’s song, “Birdland”:

His father died and left him a little farm in New England.
All the long black funeral cars left the scene
And the boy was just standing there alone
Looking at the shiny red tractor
Him and his daddy used to sit inside
And circle the blue fields and grease the night.
It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars
‘Cause when he looked up they started to slip.
Then he put his head in the crux of his arm
And he started to drift, drift to the belly of a ship,
Let the ship slide open, and he went inside of it
And saw his daddy ‘hind the control board streamin’ beads of light,
He saw his daddy ‘hind the control board,
And he was very different tonight
‘Cause he was not human, he was not human.

Little boy’s face lit up with such naked joy
That the sun burned around his lids and his eyes were like two suns,
White lids, white opals, seeing everything just a little bit too clearly
And he looked around and there was no black ship in sight,
No black funeral cars, nothing except for him, the raven
And fell on his knees and looked up and cried out,
No, daddy, don’t leave me here alone,
Take me up, daddy, to the belly of your ship,
Let the ship slide open and I’ll go inside of it
Where you’re not human, you are not human.

But nobody heard the boy’s cry of alarm.
Nobody there ‘cept for the birds around the New England farm
And they gathered in all directions, like roses they scattered
And they were like compass grass coming together into the head of a shaman bouquet
Slit in his nose and all the others went shooting
And he saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake
Grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck,
All his limbs, everything was twisted and he said,
I won’t give up, won’t give up, don’t let me give up,
I won’t give up, come here, let me go up fast,
Take me up quick, take me up, up to the belly of a ship
And the ship slides open and I go inside of it, where I am not human.

Someday I will not be human. But for now, I am and I won’t give up, especially the fight to see some justice restored in our world for the oppressed peoples.

I love you, Daddy. I am old now but I miss you and what might have been, whether it would have been a good, bad, or indifferent relationship. The silence of 50 years has been deafening.