Chester's lost chapter.

After he died they finally talked about it. Bess and Maxine said he was never the same after the war. He was always the kindest of men. Everyone loved him, but some how, he was different--and it was hard to describe. What had he seen over there? Those answers had died with him, he seemed determined to not burden others with it.

Like many, he came home to continue his life after an interruption that would render it so different than it might ever have been, had the world been spared another conflict.

War was ugly, so many didn't come home--had no life to continue. Wives picked up, moved in with family, widows resigned to raise kids without a Dad. Wives without a husband. Families without men. Or broken men. Those were the choices. So what difference did it make now? Why talk about it?

Somehow the cruelty of man pitted against man for concepts greater than they could fathom, needed to be buried to have any sense of normal, so that's what Chester and his brothers-in-arms did. Pushed it way down so it only ever came up in private moments when the wind would blow a certain way or on random nights with the thunderstorms would rumble so loud the windows in the tidy brick rancher rattled him awake, lightening blinding him as he sat up in a sweat, unsure of where he was.

The very thing others respected and loved in Chester, his quite calm, the measured, wise tone of his voice, and gentle sprit, were the very things they said were different after 1945. He was more lively before the war. They said he was even funny--a jokster. It wasn't that he or others were deprived of joy, there was always enough of that. Life had lots of pleasures: teaching the grandkids about the birds who flocked to his many feeders, visiting castles in Germany with Maxine, a newly solved puzzle, and the yearly trip to Nags Head. These were the things that made up a life.

Resilience was his gift to the family who had welcomed him back and not asked questions. Head down, keep a stiff upper lip. Many men would have gone crazy at the unrealized dreams he'd put aside to join the Army Air Corps. But whatever he experienced made the quiet life enough for Chester.

He'd learned to play the slack key guitar in service. It'd traveled back with him, bought in a German pawn shop for a few days wages. But when the grandkids hauled it out of the attic he wouldn't play it. Surely it had brought some fun to the long days and nights in barracks, between the monthly mail drop, but the memories varnished into the tobacco-colored wood were all part of that lost chapter, the one he didn't care to revisit.

A life story can be written down, a person can be eulogized. Fond memories make the stuff of conversations on holidays and at reunions. But somehow the book of an exemplary life can't be completed without the missing chapter. Family is left to wonder, to create what might have been, in the spaces and sentences left unsaid. And that's the saddest chapter of all.

David Wiggs

January 11,2014