Today, we visited the grounds where my grandfather left a part of himself behind—and left carrying a part of it with him forever.
A part of him died in the Ardennes during that Belgian winter, but he buried it so deeply that even he didn’t quite know it and neither did we—not until years and years later, when small vessels in his brain became blocked and his mind began to play tricks on him, when his nightmares no longer stopped when he opened his eyes.
I walked through the forest, verdant and lush in the damp Belgian March, and thought of Papa. I am much older now walking among these birch trees than he was then; my grandfather was hardly older than the students I am chaperoning. He was twenty and cold and in a foxhole thousands and thousands of miles from home. A “big boy doing a man’s work,” as Frost writes.
I remember the way he used to bring me into his bed whenever I had nightmares and calm my fussing by telling me to put my ear on his chest and to listen: “Listen to my heart.” Thinking of him there, shivering in his Army-issued blanket, I wonder what I might have said to him during those sleepless nights withstanding the freezing cold and the Nazi offensive. Would he even believe me in that moment if I told him what a loving family he would have? That he would be remembered with intense love three-quarters of a century later? That the battlefield where he watched his friends kill and be killed would become a monument to peace?
He went home after the Battle of the Bulge when a mortar jumped out of its spiked position and drove forcefully through his knee. The picture below shows him in France before the mess in the Ardennes—posing like the twenty-year-old he was before going into that forest. I took the other this afternoon, when the sun emerged briefly as I walked through a small glade near where my grandfather may have dug in seventy-five years ago.
