The toddler with the blond curls, laughing and zooming in and out of the camera on chubby legs, is me. Suddenly I am swept up into the arms of smiling man with square shoulders and black hair. “Look,” my mother would always say at this point when we watched the film, “his hair was so black the light sometimes made it look blue.”
The smiling man is a farm boy from Michigan’s Thumb. In a few months, on Good Friday, 1951, he is gone. The story in the New York Times says, “Two F-84 Thunder-jet fighters crashed in the air near Litchfield Park today, sending one of the most decorated fliers in the Air Guard plunging to his death.”
He is my father. Somewhere inside I know how it felt to be swept up in those arms, to be adored by the young couple just starting what they thought would be a long life together. As Eva Cassidy sings so hauntingly, I know him by heart. But I do not remember him. My memories of him are made of that short flickering film, of photos and clippings, of war medals and trophies, and most of all, of the stories told by those who loved him.
Let Memorial Day always be filled with stories about those we have lost in service to our country, and may they be told with joy and reverence, not sorrow.
Jonah Lehrer, writing in Frontal Cortex, reminds us that memory is literally transformative:
[W]e like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated.
To all those we have lost, you are still with us. Because we remember.
