"I realise how much I care about how this hard-and-soft, losable object has survived. I need to find a way of unravelling its story. Owning this netsuke - inheriting them all - means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them."

-Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes (2010)

When I return to the American Flag and my Nana's pile of letters, I am in awe of all that these objects have been able to tell me. I examine Virginia's perfect script and see her sitting down at a desk in Nuremberg and enjoying, if only for a few moments, the comfort of confiding in someone she could trust. I feel pity for her in the sense that she could not talk to the only other person who had experienced these post-war realities alongside her, but I now understand that silence was the way that both she and Red coped with their memories.

 I run my fingers down the length of a red stripe and think about what this American symbol would have meant to my great-grandfather. I'm sure he appreciated it as much as I do now, but of course in an entirely different way. For Red, this flag was a representation of the family he became a part of when he joined the Army at the age of twenty-five. Lt. Col. Clisson gave the next thirty years of his life to his brothers on the battlefield and all his boys in the 2nd Battalion, and it is my belief that his heart never left them. 

These two objects began as just that; objects. These now priceless pieces of my family history were once just a pad of notepaper, an ink pen, and nearly ten feet of cloth. But as this journey has taught me, objects are not entities in and of themselves. They are imbued with the people who have owned them, affected by the places that they have passed through, and are therefore able to tell the stories that most other records of history tend to forget. When I think about how these objects existed before they were picked up and utilized for this project, I realize that I've done justice by them in the same way that I tried to do justice by the memory of my great-grandfather. I have the satisfaction of knowing that twenty years from now when I pass down the story of their great-ancestor to my own children, these letters and this American flag will be inextricably attached to that oral history. These objects and the man that they remember will never be swallowed by silence again.