Dougie
I could not know what was being given then ...
Dougie
My uncle Dougie was killed on Sword Beach, the 6th of June, nineteen hundred and forty four. The cadence of the date like a slow chant in my father’s mind round the one central memory. Dougie taught him how to swim before he died. There are other words still said in unassuming reverence when our heads bend over the letters and you remake and relive the familiar loss, as if forging his absence new again, each phrase measured by its careful placement in silence. His regiment, The East Yorkshires I remember since childhood and, your Grandma and Grandpa didn’t know for months, and now in final silence the bleak unnatural and late arriving telegram folded and unfolded down fifty years. Sometimes I know my father is a young boy again and Dougie, teaching him how to swim, has suddenly turned away as if in a dream and looks toward France. Then he is low down in the water near the horrific shore and my father’s arms so recently taught to live in that element are reaching to pull him back. But the weighted surge of his elder brother’s pack and rifle pull too much for the young boy’s arms. Now I remember my father’s repeated weekend need for the ice cold waters where he taught me how to swim and his fatherly satisfaction at the slowly growing strokes that kept his son above water. I could not know what was being given then not knowing how as the years pass we must always strike boldly to save those close to us, hold them above the drowning water with our words, so they live again, if not the man, then the loved memory, father to son, brother to brother, hand dipping in the water toward shore, saving them now as we could not then, phrase by repeated phrase. -from The House of Belonging
Americans, it seems to me, are not inclined toward memory. There is a growing trend to have no service, no memorial, other than cute and witty anecdotes about the deceased. “Keep it positive!” I have heard in a room where a dead body is lying in a box, all dressed up and waxen. But the one in the box or the ash urn deserves credit for their tears and fears, their service and their sacrifice, their bloody knuckles, sweaty brows, and empty wallets. Thank you for introducing me to the fallen and to the love and hope that fell with him. Thank you for revealing the power of memory to keep life real and eternal. -Dwight Lee Wolter
Thank you for your beautiful poem which made me cry. Two of my great uncles died at Gallipoli and it still astonishes me how their brief lives and deaths are so real to me, who was born 50 years after their passing. You capture it so well: “hold them
above the drowning water
with our words,
so they live again,
if not the man,
then the loved
memory,”