A great debt

Remembering those whose love of country cost them and their families dearly | Andrée Seu

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

My husband was buried the day after Memorial Day. It was also our firstborn's 18th birthday. Sometimes I went to the cemetery afterward and sat, with Route 263 faint in the background, which was surreal: My name and half-dates in granite, begging resolution like an incomplete musical scale. To what purpose rejoin that mindless traffic, when the road leads back here? It had better be a noble one.

From one perspective, life is what I have done between cemetery visits. I always accompanied my grandmother on Memorial Days to "see Norman." Of course Norman wasn't there at all, just a VFW American flag in a patch of flags. The backstory on Norman, learned years later, is that he couldn't wait to sign up but he was only 17 and his mom refused. Behind her back, my grandfather gave his John Hancock and Norman hitched to Providence. They got hit first time out by Japanese dive bombers; he was down in the engine room. When the envelope came, my mother happened to be home from elementary school for lunch and the carrier handed it to her on the steps of their tenement house. She ran up excited to show her father such official-looking mail. He knew what was in that black-bordered greeting and broke down.