A message for my grandfather, on Veterans' Day

I never met either of my grandfathers. My paternal grandfather died when my own father was a child. My maternal grandfather died while my mother was pregnant with me. There are no family stories of my father's father, though it has seemed to me that his death was the knell of disaster that fated my father into a difficult struggle for the next 40 years until he also died, also too young. But there are lots of stories about my mother's father, born Andrew Jackson Burrell in 1893 in Clayton, Georgia.

My brothers, though their own memories are only those of small-childhood too (they were 10 and 4 when Dad-Dad passed) regaled me through the years with their bragging about all the spoiling that they got and I missed out on. Frankly, I think a precious little granddaughter would have really messed up that gig for them! A black and white snapshot shows Dad-Dad cuddling my brother Barry who has been dead nearly 30 years. My mother's memoirs contain a chapter called My Father's Hands, which begins with how when she was born weighing only 3.5 pounds, her height of 13" was measured in the span of her father's hand.

On this day of days, it isn't that my grandfather was the only soldier my family sent to war. We sent all of the men, on both sides. My dad was a Navy cook and a gunner's mate on a subchaser in the Pacific, while both his brothers were sent to Europe. Though one of his brothers deserted while on leave, the other was decorated for valor in crawling alone to a machine gun emplacement and singlehandedly taking it out.

Both my mother's brothers were drafted into the Army and sent to Europe. Her oldest brother Amory was a young father when he went to war, and the period of long weeks when he was injured and missing were hell on his family back home. Her other brother Marion remained in Europe for a time after the war's end as part of the occupying force.

But it was Andrew Jackson Burrell who went without being asked to go. At the age of 53, he enlisted rather than only send his sons where he himself was not willing. He was sent to the Pacific as a boiler tender on the USS Ticonderoga, called "Pops" by his young shipmates. And he was in the boiler room on January 21, 1945 when the first kamikaze struck. About 40 men were killed in the first strike, and several planes stowed on board caught fire and the ship began to list starboard. The captain ingeniously ordered the port bulkheads flooded so that the ship would list to port and dump off the burning planes. But not long after, the second kamikaze hit, killing a hundred more including the captain, and wounding over 200 others. My grandfather survived, though it was a hell of confusion in the depths of the burning ship - the vignette I remember vividly was being told how one of his young friends tried to escape up a ladder, and was melted to the steel.


There are other things that measure my grandfather in ways less dramatic. Those large hands wrought furniture and tools and a lovely little house built on our Pennsylvania dairy farm. He could imagine and build and repair. He raised his children, adored his grandchildren, and was a husband three times over.

My grandfather has always been shown to me through others' eyes. My mother's reminiscences, my brothers' memories of a grandfather who must have seemed godlike to these small boys. My own few contacts with two of my grandfather's nine brothers, nearly 30 years ago now, but which left definite impressions on me. His spirit as wrought in his oldest son, my adored Uncle Amory who died when I was six but whose impact on me is indelible. In Amory's son, my cousin Mike, in whom I see the same qualities of intelligence and humor and integrity and strength.

But now in my own middle age, I find I set aside the interpretive lens of others, and their memories, however precious. I think instead of the man who left behind a wife and daughter, and went to war believing that to do so would bring his own sons home. I think of the man with imagination and capacity, who knew what was right, and lived it. I reach out and find my hand engulfed in one that is impossibly large but entirely familiar. I realize I have always known my grandfather. And I speak to him, and he knows who I am.