On a cold November morning in Syracuse, NY, the fog is slowly dissipating across the damp grass as a small congregation stands in silence. A priest speaks softly about the heroism of the life now lost, and those in attendance bow their heads solemnly in agreement. While the priest says his final prayers, the group watches as six honor guards dressed in uniform approach the casket, three from each side. The 9.5 by 5 foot long flag is lifted gently from the glossed wood, and the six men begin to fold it lengthwise once, and then again. With precision, two men at the corners start the triangular fold, bringing the striped corner of the folded edge to the open one. Then the outer point is turned inward, parallel with the open edge, to form a second triangle. And so on and so forth until at last, after twelve folds and six pairs of white-gloved hands, the flag is wound tightly in and around itself to form a crisp, pressed triangle of layered cloth.
One of the military men holds the flag delicately in both hands as he approaches a woman dressed in black. She sits rigidly in her chair and stares at the now bare box that lays before her, glancing away only when the man kneels down to present it to her. As the flag is slid onto her lap and underneath her trembling hands, she sends the young boy an appreciative smile, and is taken aback as she studies his face for the first time. “That long jaw and those fair cheeks…” she thinks to herself, “…elegant nose, a bit too rounded and upturned at its tip… how do I know you?” Searching his face for a glimmer of recognition, the middle-aged woman is brought back to reality as he slowly stands up and she is confronted, once again, by the dull sheen of the polished wood box in front of her. And then all at once, as if someone had snapped their fingers right next to her ear, she realized that it was not this particular young man that she knew, but rather a young man that had been.
A boy named Henry, “Red” for short, from a small upstate town not far from her own, the young man that she quickly fell in love with, and the person that she watched slowly disappear. She closes her eyes tight and her mind is flooded with a film reel of images; the joy on his face the day they got married, his smile as he held their firstborn daughter, the pride in his eyes as he suited up to leave for the first time. Her eyes snap open to stare back at the casket, and she clenches her jaw in order to shut down the memories, reinforce the walls. The man who lies in front of her now is still called Red, he is still the father of her children, and has been a husband to her for many years, but it is not the same man that she fell in love with over forty years before. “The war did away with him,” she thinks resolutely as she gathers her things to stand up and walk away. And as much as she hates herself for it, this is the moment that the lump rises in her throat and the tears sting the corners of her eyes; somehow it was the death of innocence that was the hardest to accept.
I have thought a lot about the events of this day, November 14th, 1964, and what I’ve come up with is exactly what I just described. A mini-movie, if you will, of my great-grandfathers funeral. To be honest, I don’t particularly enjoy sitting around and daydreaming about death and the feelings of guilt, loss, and resentment that I associate so heavily with my own interpretation of his funeral, however I share this experience because it raises important questions about the absence of memory and the ways in which we, as individuals, try to come to terms with those empty holes. After I discovered the enormous wealth of information that was left behind by my great-grandmother via her letters from 1946-47, I became acutely aware of how little I actually knew about my own family. On the one hand, these letters and my great-grandma’s candid voice were providing me with an incredible amount of insight regarding the relationships within my family and her experience living in Post-WWII Germany (an event that I had never even known occurred prior to reading about it). But on the other hand, all of this new information only made me more curious about what else I did not know. It felt as if I had opened Pandora’s box and was now responsible for uncovering every piece of information, every story, every picture, and every memory pertaining to my great-grandparents’ lives that had ever existed. As I began to embark on this process I thought very heavily about Edmund de Waal’s comment about the “thinness” of memory; about how the moments of the past can become so easily lost in the larger events, about how our modern cultural perceptions of history can overshadow the reality of what was, and about the danger of allowing my great-grandparent’s WWII story to “thin” into the millions of other WWII stories that had already been told.