“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood
For weeks now, newspaper headlines have increased the font size of the daily updates about Russia and Ukraine. It’s been like watching a storm come in, and today, the clouds have broken and headlines are screaming in their largest fonts.
While it’s hard to reconcile my current sunny-in-California reality with what’s happening somewhere else on the planet, I’m unable to shake he heavy feeling in my heart. There are so many costs to war, any war. In the moment and long afterward.
A few weeks ago, when we were in Hawaii, eating lunch across the water from Pearl Harbor, my husband pointed out the historic mooring of the ship his grandfather was deployed on a year after that fateful Dec. 7. After eating, we went over to the monument and walked through the museum, reviewing scenes of the mayhem that had occurred in such an idyllic place. It was more moving than I expected it to be. Reading about how the attack was planned and then played out reminded and how xenophobia rose to the fore immediately after, remind me so much of September 11. Mostly, I thought of how my dad was only 15 in 1941, and how he would enlist as soon as he could. How family stories about World War II have permeated both my husband’s and my own life.
I wrote ‘Overseas & Faraway,’ a fictionalized account of growing up with someone in active military, some years ago. I had just had a long conversation with another friend about our dads. Her father had served in World War II in Europe, while mine was in the tail end of that war in the Philippines. By the time we were a part of their lives, they were proud of their service, but they never talked details with us. We had to piece things together. Likewise, my maternal grandfather fought in WWI in then-Yugoslavia. He moved to the US as soon as he could after that. He never spoke to we children about it, but he flew into rages at random. Everyone walked on eggshells around him. Years later, my mom carried that fear with her into our household. I didn’t put it together until long after he passed that he he likely suffered from PTSD.
Otherwise, my grandfather was, like my dad and aunt, a pacifist. Same with my friend’s dad. All of them had come home from their services and moved toward peace and quiet: tending gardens, living simply and with appreciation for the mundane. They knew just how precious, how fragile, the ordinary was, and is. I don’t think they wanted anyone of us, anyone really, to know the extent of horrors they’d seen.
Today, as the headlines blare out reports of the Russian invasion, happening now as I sit in my house, contemplating a walk on the beach, I’m chilled at the history being made, and the inevitable consequences to come.
gone off to places we couldn't see
fighting wars we didn't want to believe
all the things he couldn't say
about overseas and faraway
overseas and faraway