Truth and Lies, Remembering and Forgetting
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. What are your plans?
A family barbecue? Going to a parade? Sleeping in? Taking the shutters off the summer cabin?
In a former fashion era, Memorial Day was when ladies could wear white shoes and linen dresses for the season.
Like Easter with the bunnies and the chocolate eggs or Christmas with the reindeer and the elves, Memorial Day can get far from its roots.
At its core, however, Memorial Day is a serious proposition.
During the Civil War, on various designated days, women of the Confederacy placed flowers on the graves of their loved ones killed in the fight.
After the war, some United States officials were queasy about adopting this Confederate sort of remembrance, but in 1868, “Decoration Day” was established as an official holiday to honor and mourn those who died fighting—for the union.
May 30 marked this day of remembrance until 1970; now, the federal holiday is observed on the last Monday of the month.
In 2000, President Clinton proclaimed Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace, and designated 3:00 p.m. (local time) for the National Moment of Remembrance.
Later that year, Congress followed suit with Public Law 106-579. The law permanently made the moment of remembrance at 3:00 PM a symbolic act of unity, “to reclaim Memorial Day as the sacred and noble event that (it) is intended to be.”
However, for many people, mourning the war dead on Memorial Day might be an abstraction, something that hasn’t touched them personally. Our country has actually lost fewer war dead over the centuries than many nations. Since the Revolutionary War, about 1.35 million Americans have perished in military service. That’s actually small compared to military deaths in Europe—for World War II alone. I’ve seen estimates for Germany of somewhere between four and seven million deaths, China three to four million, and for Russia from eight and a half to eleven million.
In my own family, members served in foreign wars, but they came back alive. My dad returned from the Invasion of Normandy; my uncle from the Pacific in World War II. My cousin survived the Vietnam War in one piece. But I didn’t really have a family connection to Memorial Day.
Just three weeks ago, my sister Lee showed up at my door with a pile of old notebooks and diaries she’d found in a box at the back of her closet.
The notebooks are falling apart. The pages are smelly and yellowing. They make your nose run and your fingers wrinkle just to touch them. But open them up, and you go into a time machine.
One loose-leaf binder is labeled: “Our doings from 1858 to 1929.”
The doings were mainly those of my great-grandfather, DeWitt G Wilcox and his wife, Jane. Born in Akron, Ohio in 1858. Dr. Wilcox, as he became, had a distinguished career as a surgeon in Buffalo, New York, and in Newton, Massachusetts.
Reading his papers, I fell in love with this man. He was a good writer and a funny and self-deprecating person. Every year, in a comical Christmas card, he joked about getting older. One such card showed him on a bicycle, bent over, pedaling away and saying, “Maybe, if I pedal hard enough, I might overtake Methuselah.”
Looking through his diaries brought early 20th century American history to life for me. His take on President Woodrow Wilson’s election slogan, “He kept us out of war?” A joke! Sure, “long enough to get elected,” Dr. Wilcox said.
He also wrote vividly about the 1918 influenza pandemic.
A joyful moment in his record was the wedding of his oldest son, Max, on June 7, 1918, during the second year that the United States was in the war. The family gathered at the bride’s parents’ house in Burlington, Massachusetts, where the porch was decorated with lanterns and spring flowers.
They were particularly excited because the groom’s younger brother and best man, Gifford, or Giff, was able to come. At the last minute Gifford had gotten leave from the United States Naval Reserves.
DeWitt and his sons Max and Gifford were all in uniform. DeWitt was a Captain of the Medical Corp in the Massachusetts State Guard. Max was a Lieutenant junior grade surgeon in the Navy. The baby of the family, Gifford was an aviation cadet.
Gifford, especially, had a wonderful time at the wedding. During the evening, he won the girl of his heart, the bridesmaid. Her name was Dorothy—Dot, for short. Gifford had been hopelessly in love with her since their freshman year in high school. She was, Dr. Wilcox said, “brilliant as a student, gifted as an artist with brush and pencil…the most beautiful part of it all she seemed unconscious of her talents. Gifford had no easy task of winning her as her suitors were many….”
The wedding went off as planned. The family dispersed, all aglow with happiness.
Besides winning the girl of his dreams, it had been a year of adventures for young Gifford Wilcox.
In March 1917, he was a sophomore at Dartmouth College. Although pretty good in mathematics, he was not academically inclined. Rather, he was known for his engaging personality. He was a member of the college musical and dramatic clubs and an expert swimmer.
That fateful spring of 1917, German submarines attacked American ships and German diplomats tried to enlist Mexico into the war on their side. It became increasingly obvious that the United States would not stay out of the conflict much longer.
On March 26—ten days before Congress declared war—Gifford Wilcox sent his parents a telegram from Hanover.
“I have decided to enlist in mosquito fleet (the nickname for the converted small craft…and, not reassuring to parents, later called the Suicide Fleet)… we have crew of men already made up…have considered the matter carefully and read the requirements…enlist for four years…can resign in time of peace…cannot be transferred to navy… what do you think of plan?”
His dad and mom—convinced it was their patriotic duty to approve, did just that.
Off went Gifford, with his enthusiasm…humor…optimism. He was a chip off the old block, just like his dad, and very close to him.
He went into the Naval Reserves, and after a while applied for the aviation service. On August 1, 1918, he had arrived in Pensacola, Florida, for flight training.
Just picture the kind of craft he flew in. It had only been fifteen years since the Wright Brothers had made their first flight at Kitty Hawk. The planes that Gifford trained on looked like something out of a Peanuts cartoon, manned by Snoopy in goggles and scarf flying behind. Two wide wooden wings, one above the open cockpit, one below. One engine, one propeller. The whole thing looked like it was held together with picture-hanging wire and toothpicks.
But Gifford took to flying like a duck to water. No—a bird to air.
At the end of August, less than a month into his training, he wrote to his mother:
“…the course (in gunnery) was mighty interesting. The last part of it was composed of firing at targets in the water with regular bullets and firing at other planes with a camera gun which takes motion pictures…. To do all this you have to stand up in the plane and believe me, the way the wind whistles by you is a crime. It darn near rips the shirt off your back but it certainly is exhilerating (sic) sport.
At present I am taking ground school along with instruction flying in the big boats such as we will fly abroad. I haven’t had any of the flying yet for all the propellors (sic) in those machines have been condemned but I hope to start in a day or so.
Well, Mother….Take things easy….
So much love to you all,
Gifford.”
Gifford, they later realized, neglected to post this letter. It was a few days before a friend found it and sent it to his parents.
Meanwhile, Dr. DeWitt Wilcox and his wife Jane, recently home from vacation, were back into their routines in Newton, Massachusetts. All was going well, when, as Dr. Wilcox later wrote to a friend:
“At about 1 o’clock Thursday Morning, the phone rang And a kind voice said, “Dr., we have a sad message for you. This is Western Union….your son Gifford met his death in a fall from an airplane. Body not recovered.“
“I can generally brace to meet most any situation,” wrote DeWitt, “but the life went out of my hands and arms like a paralysis and I dropped the phone to the floor. Jane had awakened at the ring of the phone and when she heard the crash she guessed the truth.”
“How we passed the next few hours I hardly know…”
Further telegrams and dispatches from the Navy and letters from Gifford’s friends described more fully his death.
The plane, flown by Gifford’s flight instructor, “was probably 2000 feet in the air…. The machine made one and a half spirals and then seemed to go into a tailspin. (It) came out of the spin at 400 feet and the danger seem to be over but a moment later it started to spin again…. The crash was unavoidable, as they did not have enough altitude….
“Everything possible was done to save the men in the plane. The wrecking barge lifted the wreckage out of the water but they could not find Giff‘s body…. There are strong currents in Pensacola Bay and it is frequently very difficult to locate bodies after they are lost….The divers will continue to search until all hope is gone….”
Expressions of sympathy poured in. Gifford’s fellow student aviators wrote, “Your loss has been our loss. Your son was one of the most popular men at the station. His sunny disposition and sterling character won him numerous friends wherever he went…”
Gifford’s fiancée, Dot, wrote to his parents, crushed.
The parents struggled to make sense of their son’s death. They tried to be brave.
“We gave the dear boy unquestioning and unfaltering to the service of his country … and now that he has paid the supreme price, we have no complaint to offer, believing that this war was and is absolutely necessary to the perpetuity of freedom and Christianity. Such an end cannot be obtained without sacrifice and why should we ask to escape?”
They went back to their lives and their work. Dr. Wilcox did his normal daytime job and also worked every other night, treating influenza victims from the merchant marine as they flooded in from Boston Harbor.
He wrote to a friend, “I am sitting in a shack with the rain pelting on the ruberoid roof…Inside are nurses coming and going, encased in oilskins, rubber boots, rubber hats…and face masks….Some 20 ambulances, all belonging to the State Guard, chase one another from East Boston up Corey Hill with loads of patients….I tell you they (are) some sick fellows. Poor little chaps, many not over 18 years of age.”
“It is fortunate for me,” he wrote, “that I can be occupied, as it keeps me from dwelling on my sorrow. Jane and I are trying hard to keep our minds on that high plane of living which derives peace from a sense of having given our best to a most worthy cause.”
But, keeping one’s mind on a high plane of living isn’t easy. He kept coming down to earth. “It is the little hourly tumbles into the earthly reality that causes so much pain…The grief will not stop…the pang is ever present.
“The hardest is to realize that we shall never see Gifford again. There is not a nook or corner of the house, garden or even the auto that is not associated with the dear boy.”
A particularly bad day was when Gifford’s belongings arrived from Pensacola and they unpacked his trunk.
“There were all his belongings just as he had left them. The sleeves in his shirt rolled up, his pocket camera with half the roll (of film) exposed, …. all the personal (belongings) just as he expected to return to them.”
In the century old pages of Dr. DeWitt Wilcox’s account, I found my personal connection with Memorial Day.
Memorial Day might well arouse widely conflicting emotions among different people, especially depending on whether you supported or opposed a particular war. You might feel pride. Anger. Frustration. Was a loved one’s death justified? Was it in vain?
The answers might not help us agree on a sacred day of national unity.
But certainly we can unite in a sacred day of compassion and sorrow.
Perhaps we might expand for just this year the notion of death in sacrifice to the nation. We might remember the medical personnel who died on the coronavirus front…the grocery store checkout clerks or sanitation workers who also lost their lives to the virus, in service to others. They ran toward danger, not away from it.
No matter what one’s politics, when the phone call comes at 1:00 in the morning, the grief is a crushing, undeniable truth.
The trunk arriving with the loved one’s belongings still brings the flood of tears.
A hundred years ago, the camera might arrive with half a roll of film unused. Today, it might be a cell phone with unanswered messages. But they signify the same thing—an interrupted life. Often a young one. A loved one.
Our minds may try to come up with reasons to console us…but our bodies face the truth. The person is gone. The lump in the throat won’t go away. The chest constricts. The tears come without warning.
At its most human, Memorial Day offers us to practice not patriotism or militarism but a call for compassion for those who are left behind.
Three generations ago in my own family, tragedy struck. It is too late to offer compassion to dead people, but it’s never too late to offer it to the living. I remind myself that there are people grieving, today. Tomorrow at 3:00 PM, let us observe that national moment of remembrance. If we meet someone who is grieving, let us honor their sacrifice and show them our condolences however we can. Their loved one ran toward the danger and not away from it. It’s our job to comfort the people left behind.
Order-of-Service-20210530