Just before my father died, a perceptive, insightful hospice nurse arranged for a group of young army veterans to visit his bedside and read him a military message of honor. Dressed in full uniform, the men read a formal letter of appreciation for my father’s service during the Korean War.
My father was very weak after several months of treatment for glioblastoma. When the men saluted him, my father raised a shaky arm to salute them back. It took a long time for his hand to reach his forehead, but it did. The men waited patiently by the side of the hospital bed we had placed in the middle of his living room. Later that night, my father slipped into a comatose state; my sister, mother, and I waited beside him as he took his final breaths.
Like many men of his generation, my father joined the Army when he was underage. Part of his motivation was patriotic, part was adventure, and part was a need to escape heartbreak after his high school sweetheart—my mother—ran off and married another man. He completed his basic training and was stationed in Germany for two years. The day before he was scheduled to return home to his Boston neighborhood, he received orders to head to Pusan and spent the next two years on active duty in Korea.
When he finally returned home, he discovered that his sweetheart had left the scoundrel she’d married, and he wooed her anew. They married, had five kids, bought a house with a low-interest GI loan, and later retired to Florida on a good pension. That’s where they enjoyed their life until brain cancer claimed my dad.
When I was a teenager—smug and self-righteous—I argued with my father about war and resistance. The Vietnam War was raging, and I participated in anti-war activism. But he never tried to prevent me from speaking my truth. I wish I’d had the wisdom, then, to hear my father out about his time in the Army and what it had meant to him.
I also wish I’d had the patience, the humility, and the insight of that hospice nurse, who recognized that important part of my father’s life. I still see his shaky salute, and I talk to him about it now. I think he understands.
Lenore Balliro
Dartmouth, Massachusetts
