Poor Horatio
It's pretty hard to forget a thing like that
Grandma and Grandad (updated)
It's April 5th, 2020, steeling my voice, I say, “Bye, Grandad.” He didn't respond. He couldn't. My head tells me that's the last goodbye I'll tell him. My heart desperately hopes it's not.
Some people you think, really just hope, will live forever, but time eventually gets the best of us all. Assisted living facilities like where they lived were pretty much locked down at that point. That they let us in to see him at all alarmed me, but I still thought for sure Grandad would bounce back. He’s too tough, too stubborn, too important to me, to die.
The next morning Grandma asked my dad, “What happened to that man in the bed?” not realizing “that man” was the man she had been married to for nearly 72 years.
“That was Dad, Mom, he’s gone to heaven,” my dad replied.
“Oh, was he sick?” she asked, becoming upset. “I should have taken better care of him.”
Dementia may have taken Grandma's memories, but it couldn't take the kindness and caring in her heart.
Less than a year later I sat in the same assisted living facility and said another goodbye. Sometimes when I think of Grandma's struggles the last few years of her life I remember her sitting in a wooden rocking chair at home, she knew her mind and body were failing, and, as she gently rocked back and forth, she twirled her finger to the sky and said, “I'm ready to… check out.”
On January 20th, 2021, Grandma checked out. She was ready. I was not.
Grandma had forgotten her husband. She had forgotten most of her own stories. Who was that man? And who was that woman?
It's just into 1924 in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. The nearby town has a population of around 500 and the county has around 15,000 people. The main road out of town heads northwest, following it for maybe five miles there is a road to your left. There is a gravel road that snakes down until you reach a flatter section. A creek runs along the side and on the right is an old farmhouse.
The house is gone now, lost to a fire in the 1950s, maybe it was, but when I've been there I could imagine a house and fields teeming with activity.
That’s where Denzil, my grandad, was born. He was the tenth of what would be eleven surviving children. There were two girls, then two boys, another girl that did not reach the age of two, then seven more boys. The old farm had cows, chickens, pigs, mules for plowing, along with fields of tobacco, corn, and vegetables.
His dad lost part of his right arm in a sawmill accident. I’ve often wondered what medicine was like in the middle-of-nowhere-Kentucky in the early 1900s for that kind of injury. The date when his dad lost part of his arm has been lost to history, but as far as Grandad could remember it had always been like that. Bending what was left of his arm below the elbow up, he would hang a bucket on it to feed the pigs. He plowed the fields and took care of the farm as if he still had two good arms. When something didn’t go his way he would exclaim, “Dadburn!”
Grandad’s mom cooked the meals, did laundry, and canned the food that was grown on the farm to be saved for later. Making use of cooler ground temperatures fresh fruits and vegetables were stored in a hole in the ground. Laundry was washed outside in a pot over a fire. I asked Grandad how often they would take a bath as kids and, always a joker, he said, “I don’t think I need to answer a question like that.”
Grandad was a “happy go lucky kid.” The kids all worked on the farm, though I believe the oldest had already moved away by the time it was Grandad’s turn. They would roam the farm and surrounding area and play baseball in the fields, using, if Grandad’s dubious claims on the matter are to be believed, “flat cow patties for bases… and the flat hard ones as frisbees.”
Electricity and running water had yet to arrive in that part of Kentucky, but life was pretty good. “We didn't have much, but we never went hungry.” In the late 1920s and early 1930s there probably wasn’t much more you could wish for. Things were about to change, however. I don’t know if it was still 1933 or 1934, but Grandad’s dad came down with tuberculosis. In those days there wasn’t much that could be done. “He worked as long and as hard as he could,” Grandad told me once, adding, “that was an awful thing.” Grandad was ten when they buried his dad on the top of the hill behind the farmhouse.
By that time some of his brothers had moved to Southwest Ohio. I’m not sure how much longer he stayed on the farm. I believe it was at least until 1940, but I’m not exactly sure. At some point Grandad went to live with one of his brothers in Ohio.
It's July 1926 and one hundred twenty miles as the crow flies to the northwest of the Kentucky farm. The first of three girls, Dolores, my grandma, is born. The county has a population of somewhere around 100,000. They have a good size garden along with goats. The house sits not far from the Great Miami River, where the girls sneak and play, get caught, and scolded by their father.
Though it was no farm, the garden was large and Grandma and her sisters worked to help the family. Grandma’s dad had a good job at the electric company, but money was tight. The fruits and vegetables were canned and, after electricity was brought into the house and a freezer was purchased, frozen. Her dad was a smart man and would eventually build his own tractor. I’ve always been impressed by that.
At various times the small house had different grandparents living in it as their means of living elsewhere had run out, so the one electric company paycheck supported seven or eight people. The sisters shared a bed. I imagine everyone working hard to scrape by in the 1930s. Much like Grandad, they didn’t have money for extras, but there was always food to eat. “We didn’t go hungry. Well, we were hungry sometimes, but we always had at least a little something to eat,” Grandma told me.
The sisters and their dad all played instruments, the tuba, mellophone, clarinet, and trumpet, if I’m remembering correctly. I wish I could see a video of that. Grandma and her sisters marching around the yard would be a sight to see.
At some point along the way Grandma’s youngest sister was sick. A nurse came to their house and helped get them back on their feet. After seeing that nurse Grandma knew she would also be a nurse.
Before fate would bring my grandparents together there was a world war to get through.
After Grandad moved to Ohio he got a job in a paper mill. I asked him if he went to school after he moved to Ohio and he told me, “I never quite finished school.” He had four brothers in the Army and would jokingly say, “I was the only one dumb enough to join the Marines.” Despite claims that he had second degree flat feet, and I'm still not sure if that was another joke or not, they let him in. In a mass enlistment ceremony he joined the “Middletown Platoon.”
An article in the Middletown Journal included this about the enlistment.
The Middletown platoon has been completed, and the Middletown men will remain together through all their training and probably through much of their service. These 64 men will undoubtedly find their service period extremely interesting and enjoyable since they will be a group of men with similar interests and in many cases they will be with their life-long buddies. Lt. Herbert Warm states Saturday, while discussing the formation of the Middletown platoon.
“Interesting and enjoyable” - interesting, yes, enjoyable, I don't think Grandad would have used that word to describe his time in the Marines. They were mostly split up by the time they reached Parris Island. Grandad wasn’t much of a fan of basic training. He made it through and went next to, what had just been christened, Camp Lejeune. When it was time to ship out he took a train to San Diego and began the long journey to American Samoa. “I was about the most homesick guy you could imagine,” he said.
They trained while in American Samoa. Then they spent some time in New Zealand, where Grandad learned he wasn’t much of a fan of mutton. From there they went to Guadalcanal. The island was officially in US hands by that point, but he recalled Washing Machine Charlie flying over at night. He said you could tell by the sound of the bomb if it was going to be close enough that you would need to take cover.
Then it was on to Operation Cherryblossom, the name given to the operation that would take part of Bougainville for an airfield. On November 1, 1943 he landed at Cape Torokina.
“It was rough; the first landing we made was early in the morning. The Japanese were bombing us and spraying us with bullets. We made beachhead, but we didn't get very far the first day. The next morning we made it a little bit farther.”
They had to fight their way through swampy jungle. Not long ago Grandad told me there were times when he’d dig a foxhole, sit down in it, and the water would come up to just under his chest. At night he could hear the Japanese saying, “Hey Joe, hey Joe” and other things to try and get the Marines to reveal their position.
“Some days you'd fight all day long and other days you'd sit around and do nothing, it's crazy. The only time I ever got real worried, we were on Bougainville and a phone call came in and said that a big bunch of Japanese ships were heading our way and they were going to land behind you. I took the phone call that night and we thought we had had it. If they would've come behind us we would've, but the Navy intercepted and they turned around and went back.”
That “big bunch of Japanese ships” was seven cruisers that had been sent to Rabaul with the idea of disrupting the Bougainville operation. US Navy carrier attacks thwarted that attempt.
Based on the things Grandad said he must have been involved in the Battle of Piva Forks. He mentioned “Grenade Hill” a few times over the years. The Japanese were so close that the Marines would pull the grenade pin, release the handle, and countdown until there were three seconds left. That’s when they would throw it. You might get it back otherwise.
“The biggest thing we hit one time that I can recall, we made a push up to the river and we really hit the enemy there. They were on the other side. We stayed there overnight and the next morning we called in for some more troops and some bombers. The Japanese started shelling us and that island was shaking all over. Trees were falling. We were in the swamp. If it hadn't been for the swamp, they would've wiped us out. The shells would just go down in the mud. That's where I got a hole blown in my helmet. The hole was two inches in diameter. You'd look up and see trees falling and shells coming in. I think our outfit laid down 7500 rounds of shells that morning, so you can figure what the Japanese were laying back on us.”
I found this in the Combat Rep of Bougainville Ops that gave me an idea what kind of shells Grandad might have had coming his way.
The Japanese made frequent use of their 90mm mortars during the period 17 to 25 November. This weapon is, by far, the most potent of any in the Japanese armament, even including their 15 centimeter gun when used as an anti-personnel weapon. The 90mm shell contains an explosive having such a terrifically high velocity of reaction as to be incomprehensible to one who has not been subjected to its force.
“We knew there were some troops in there but not that many. That's where I first saw one of my good buddies get killed. He was about ten feet over from me and he got up to move and the Japanese shot him right in the head. What hurt was that he laid there for probably two hours before he died.”
At one point Grandad went out on a scouting mission with about a dozen others. They ended up getting cut-off and had to fight their way back. For four days those dozen Marines were behind enemy lines. He said there were times when they would call in artillery support and the shells would go just beyond their position.
“I made it one time for four days on a little chocolate bar about two inches square. When you take a bath you take it with your clothes on. If you make it to a river you take a bath and wash your clothes at the same time. You didn't get many baths. We would catch our drinking water in leaves and fill up our canteens. We'd get the rest of the water from the river, which wasn't clean at all.”
When their time at the front was over Grandad took his boots and socks off and, “the meat came off with my socks.” For the time they were at the front they never had clean, or even dry, socks.
On Christmas Day 1943 the 3d Marines were sent back to Guadalcanal. Grandad was sent to a hospital there where he could only wear socks, but no shoes, for quite a while. At one point he told a doctor, “Doc, I don't feel that good today.” The doctor “sent me to a hospital in New Caledonia, I stayed there about a month, or something like that, and then they shipped me to a Navy hospital in San Francisco.”
The things I know about Grandad’s combat experiences come from a short interview as part of a college class and the times he would say one or two things. Asking him if we could do that interview was probably the toughest question I’ve ever asked anyone. I had never heard him talk about it. He told us things he had never told my grandma, and they had been married nearly 52 years at that point.
He was emotional about some of his experiences that day in 2000 when we interviewed him and he was emotional in an interview with the local newspaper.
He sat up in his chair, looked forward and said, “I’d do it again for my country.”
In September 2019 he told me that for the first time in a long time he had a dream about being in battle again. I don’t remember who said it or where I read it, but it made me think of the saying, “For as long as he lived, the war lived in him.”
When Grandad was discharged from the hospital he made his way to Crane, Indiana. He thought he was going to be discharged, but with the war still going on that was most likely wishful thinking. He was sent to Washington DC and told he would be part of a Marine detachment that would work with the Secret Service to guard President Roosevelt. Grandad spent time in Washington DC, Shangri-La (what would become Camp David), and Warm Springs, Georgia.
FDR would always wave and say hi. Eleanor, on the other hand never waved or said hi and, “was an old sourpuss.” Chuckling, he then recalled how Eleanor gave Fala an enema and that the dog ran around the yard looking like he was dying. Grandad told me that in the first part of 2019. I was impressed he remembered the dog’s name.
He was at the Little White House in Warm Springs the day the president died.
On November 9th, 1945 Grandad was discharged and would go back to Ohio and a job at the paper mill. At some point in 1946 Grandad took a job at the steel mill, where he would work for the next 39.5 years.
While Grandad was in the Marines, Grandma was finishing high school and was looking for a way to go to nursing school. Her family couldn’t afford to pay for it, but there was a nursing shortage at home due to the war. She heard about a program on the radio called the Cadet Nurse Corps and after graduating high school in 1944 she joined the program that September.
As a Journal News article said, she “was born to be a nurse” and was incredibly proud to be in the Cadet Nurse Corps. I can hear her singing the Cadet Nurse Corps March now.
She graduated in 1947. While working at Middletown Hospital in 1946 she was helping a patient and in walked a friend of the patient. He noticed her right away. Grandma took a little longer to warm up to her patient’s friend. One time Grandma told me in a hushed tone, “Don’t tell Grandad, but I didn’t think much of him at first. I was just coming out of a relationship and wasn’t looking for a new one.”
After they were married they moved into an apartment downtown. It used to get so hot in there that it would melt the candles without being lit. They bought a house, then moved to a different house, and then moved to the home where they would live for the next 65 years.
They adopted two boys, the second of which is my dad. The two of them have all kinds of stories about growing up. Stories about Grandma backing over a tree, wanting to get a skeleton key, stories about how their parents had red hair, a red house, and their backsides were red when they misbehaved.
Christmas was always my favorite holiday as a kid. We spent Christmas Eve at Grandma and Grandad’s (paternal grandparents) and Christmas morning at Grandma and Grandpa’s (maternal grandparents). Grandad would “take the dog out” or otherwise disappear for a minute. Not long after Santa would show up ringing the bells he had and letting out a “Ho, ho, ho!” I can hear it now. One year he was having some wardrobe malfunctions and Grandma was trying to get his belt back on, which ended up way too high. The beard was over his nose. Maybe the pillow was falling out, I don’t remember. Grandad would say, “Santa’s got a lot of work to do, ho, ho, ho” and be on his way.
The love and laughter in that house during family gatherings could not be topped, especially at Christmas.
One thing I didn’t understand when I was a kid was the value of saving for the future. Fortunately for me Grandma and Grandad always bought me and my brother US Savings Bonds for Christmas. Let me tell you though, there isn’t much less exciting to kid than a zero coupon bond. I wouldn’t fully appreciate those yearly gifts until I was paying for college.
My brother and I would go over there pretty regularly. I’ll never forget playing in the snow and sledding down their neighbor’s hill.
Do you remember your first baseball glove? Grandma and Grandad bought me and my brother gloves one year. I think it was my first new glove. I don’t remember much about that one, other than it didn’t last particularly long. Somehow I ended up with Grandad’s old glove. At that point it had seen better days, but I loved it. It was a Pete Rose MacGregor and was so worn that you had to hold it just right to make out the signature. The leather was about as thin as possible and you really felt it when you caught one in the palm.
In addition to baseball gloves they also gave us a weight set that was in the basement. I’m pretty sure they paid for the golf lessons I took one year. He and I played a lot of golf together. He was nearly 70 and I was a teenager. I think I beat him one time and by then he was at least in his mid-80s. It seemed like every shot he hit was straight. And his putting was always way better than mine. Every minute on those golf courses was a treasure.
I don’t remember when it was, I must have been 16 or 17 and Grandad had back surgery. That’s when I learned I don’t like seeing the wounds of someone I care deeply about. I visited him in the hospital and the nurse came in. She rolled him on his side as I was leaving and I saw the long incision right along his spine. I walked out of the room, took a few steps down the hall, and turned around. As soon as Grandma saw me, she told me to sit down. I was about one second from passing out.
It was probably about that time when I met my wife. Whenever Grandad would see her he would smile and say, “There’s my girl!” I can hear and see that now in my head.
When my wife and I lived in Virginia they visited a few times. We were able to take them to the World War II Memorial right after it opened in 2004. Grandad didn’t think he would ever see such a thing built. We also drove by the Marine barracks at the corner of 9th and I, where he spent a lot of time.
Grandad loved doing yard work. He was always out mowing grass, picking up sticks, or just piddling around. He had one of those backpack leaf blowers that I thought was the coolest when I was a kid. I’m not sure if he ever admitted what happened, but in the fall of 2014 the suspicion was that he fell outside. He was in a lot of pain and ended up getting a shot to deaden the pain, but he lost a lot of strength and feeling in his legs. He wasn’t able to blow leaves and I went one day after work to help. I vividly remember thinking as I put that leaf blower on my back that Grandad was actually kind of old. That was the first time in my life that thought had crossed my mind. He was 90. Until then I didn't think he would ever slow down.
By this point Grandma’s memory had slipped a bit and she wasn’t as sturdy on her feet as she used to be. Grandma had slowed down and now Grandad was slowing down too.
Grandad had a little more trouble after that. He ended up with an infection in his arm and needed surgery that required a stint in a rehab facility. Grandma couldn’t stay home alone so they both went. There was no quit in him though. He was determined to get back home and take care of Grandma. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so determined. He was doing everything he could to stay in their home. And he was doing all he could to take care of Grandma.
After his fall, even with a rollator, Grandad would work in the yard. Grandad, my dad, my uncle, and I also made some trips to where he grew up. After crossing into Kentucky he would say, “Men, take a deep breath of that fresh Kentucky air.” Up on the hill where his dad is buried, Grandad’s mom and one older brother are also buried. No one takes care of it on a regular basis, so we cut the grass and trimmed back trees that were getting in the way. I know it meant a lot to him to do that. He stood near the fence and thought about his parents, especially his dad, and I could see a hint of mist in his eyes. I'm not sure the pain of losing the person you most look up to when you’re a ten year old boy ever goes away.
It was becoming more obvious that they would need to move to an assisted living facility. Grandma was really unsteady on her feet and if she fell, and she did fall several times, Grandad couldn’t help her up. Grandma would complain sometimes that all she could do was stare out the window, but she was still grateful for what she had. She was sitting in the rocking chair by the window and told me, “I was just sitting here thinking about how blessed we are to live in this country.”
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time she shuffled to the living room and sat down. Her method of sitting down at that point was to get herself lined up correctly, let go of the rollator, and let gravity do the rest. She crashed into the chair and started digging in her pocket. She pulled out some lipstick and put it on. She was 92 and her mind and body were failing her, but she still wanted to put on some lipstick like she was getting ready to go to church on a Sunday morning.
My parents and aunt and uncle helped all they could, but in the fall of 2018 they moved. Grandad was pretty emotional when he thought about never getting on his lawn tractor again. In his head I think that he thought he had failed Grandma.
They moved and made some friends, but they both missed home. “Being here hurts worse than any fall,” Grandma told me. I went over almost every weekend before the shutdown. I love listening to their stories. Hearing nursing stories from Grandma. Grandad’s stories from the farm and the occasional bit from the war. Hearing stories about their childhoods.
There was nothing better than walking in, seeing a smile on Grandma’s face, and hearing her say, “Hi Nick!” Grandad would usually have read the paper by the time I got there and would say, “Nick, you’re a smart guy, tell me about….” followed by something he had just read about.
I still thought they had a lot of years left in them. I thought for sure Grandad would make it to the century mark. As I originally wrote this I kept thinking to myself, “I’ll ask Grandad about this next time I see him.”
I'm immensely grateful for the time I had with my grandparents. Who was that man? And who was that woman? I'm biased, of course, but they were two of the greatest of the greatest generation. I don't think they make them like that anymore.
My words here cannot adequately describe the impact my grandparents had on me. If anyone has read this far, or if I’m reading this again in the future, my request is that you call an elderly friend or relative or pay them a visit. Maybe talk to them about growing up and what their parents were like. Or what Christmas or their birthday was like when they were kids. Or how they got their first job. It's fun hearing those stories. Someday you won’t have the opportunity to hear them anymore.