CHAPTER NINETEEN

Breakdown

But it’s just like another dream—off that darned ship and on this plane. We have everything around us here you ever read or heard about the islands.—January 9, 1945

It was another hectic night at our house, but we’d managed to get the dinner dishes loaded into the dishwasher and the older kids had finished their homework. Caleb, who had never been interested in television, was playing not so quietly with his matchbox cars on the floor. We’d just settled in to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos when the phone rang.

“It’s your mom,” Ric said handing me the phone.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“Your dad has had some kind of a breakdown,” she blurted out. My heart sank. I put my hand over my stomach as nerves invaded. I had a sick feeling as I took the phone to my bedroom, not even bothering to turn the lights on. I stood next to the bed unable to move any further.

“Is he OK?” I asked.

She didn’t answer my question.

“We had just parked at the grocery store. We were sitting in the car,” she continued. “I had been talking about my concern for a dear friend. I was just worried about her and I started telling him about her problem. But then I realized that she had trusted me and I shouldn’t have told him.”

“Now, Murray,” my mother had said, “you understand you can’t talk to anyone else about this. You can’t tell anyone. This is a secret.”

“Secret!” he shouted, startling her. “You don’t think I can keep a secret? I’ve been keeping a secret for fifty-seven years.”

My mother was stunned. Somehow, what had started as a typical trip to the grocery store had turned into something else. In their fifty years of marriage, she’d never seen him like this before. My father didn’t yell, ever. But this day one moment he was fine, the next he was screaming at her. She simply couldn’t fathom how fast and furious he had changed.

And then he did something else he never did—he cried. My father, who wasn’t a crier, began to sob like a baby. And as his anger dissolved to tears, he told her about the day that changed him forever.

In the waters off of Okinawa, on the deck of a ship, my father and his friend Mal sat across from each other on rolling chairs. Kamikazes littered the sky as my dad and Mal went about their work, copying the Japanese code. Every ten minutes or so they rolled their chairs across the deck of the ship to exchange places. After one of these exchanges, Dad had just buckled back in place when a kamikaze hit the water close by and shrapnel flew. In the chaos that followed, he turned to his friend.

Mal had been wounded by shrapnel. My father went to him. He cradled him like a baby. He held his dying friend in his arms. “Oh, Murray” were Mal’s last words. In the mind-numbing scene that followed, he couldn’t let go of his friend. He couldn’t leave him. His hands clenched tight to him until a comrade pried them open. The next thing he knew he was waking up in a military hospital some time later. This was the secret he kept.

I was stunned. I felt a wave of indescribable emotions. I was sad that he’d bore this secret all by himself. He’d kept it inside until it hurt so bad that it had to get out. I’d been talking to him about the war for such a long time now. My feeling that there was something more to his story turned out to be right. But before my mind traveled down that path, I was hit with an overwhelming sense of guilt.

Did I cause this? I wondered. Did all my prying and questioning cause him to have a breakdown? Did I bring to the surface something so painful that it had remained untold for more than fifty years? Maybe it should have remained untold. Maybe it was never meant to be brought to the surface. My father was in unimaginable pain. Was it my fault?

Before getting off the phone, Mom and I agreed that I would wait for him to tell me about it. It was too important to simply treat it like any other message to pass on. Hopefully, in time, my father would feel safe enough to tell me his secrets too.

Later that night, I lay in bed going over what my mother had shared. I ran it through my mind several times before I realized what she had said. She’d said Okinawa, not Iwo Jima. How could that be? My father had told me about Iwo Jima. But he’d never even mentioned Okinawa. I didn’t know much about Okinawa, but what I did know was that it was a big deal during the war. Since Dad didn’t know that I knew, I couldn’t ask him about it. And even if he did know, what would I say? What could I possibly say to make it better?

The following day, after work, I went to the shelf where I kept the original notebooks. I ran a finger along the spine of the blue and gray notebooks. But I didn’t take them down. I couldn’t. Not anymore. I left the notebooks where they belonged. I left them where this whole journey had started: on a bookshelf, hidden from everything, hidden from life. Then I slowly lowered myself to my knees. Kneeling beside my bed, my face buried in a blanket, I sobbed. Not even realizing that I was in a prayer position, I cried out.

“Why?” I whispered at first. “Why?” I said louder. “Why did he have to remember this? Why? Why couldn’t he live out his last years in peace? Why couldn’t it have stayed buried?”

It wasn’t a prayer. I was too angry, too disillusioned, to pray. My hands weren’t folded and my heart was not petitioning. God allowed this to happen. He allowed it all. He made my father have this terrible experience and then he brought the memory crashing down on him when he was so frail. It wasn’t fair and I was mad at God for letting it happen.

My father and I continued to go to breakfast on Wednesdays, and I still stopped by occasionally, but I didn’t bring anything with me. We didn’t talk about the war. He had changed. Every now and then I could see it in his eyes. He’d bow his head or stare out the window a little too long. And I knew. He remembered. He sat in quiet grief and all I could do was watch.

My mother too saw the quiet grief. Her concern prompted her to ask the impossible of him. She asked him to talk about what had happened to someone other than family. Ed Hamshar was their minister, and Nila his wife. Much to my mother’s surprise, he agreed. They met at the minister’s home.

My father told his whole WWII story, from beginning to end. My father, a man of few words, talked nonstop for two hours. During that time, the Hamshars didn’t interrupt or even ask questions. They simply let him talk. My mother prayed, and she knew the Hamshars were praying too.

As they got ready to leave, Nila said she had a word for my father.

“I feel like I’m supposed to tell you that you are not crazy,” she said.

When they got in the car to go home, my father said that those words meant a lot to him. He said he often felt like he was crazy. But her words brought a measure of peace to him.

Talking to someone about his experience and his grief was a first step on a path that I hoped would lead him back to me. I had started this and I wanted to help make it better, if that was even possible. But for now, all I could do was wait and hope.

A few weeks later, I went to my parents’ house when I knew my father wouldn’t be home. Mom greeted me with a cup of tea and a tin of shortbread cookies.

“I was going to call you today,” she said. “Your dad said to tell you girls about his friend, about his breakdown in the parking lot.”

“Mom,” I said after a few nibbles of cookie. “Do you think this happened because of me, I mean because of the letters and me asking all those questions? Is it my fault?” I choked back tears and tried to keep my voice from shaking.

“Probably,” she said gently.

My heart sank.

We sat in quiet for a moment too long. She seemed deep in thought. Finally, she broke the silence.

“But Karen,” she added, “this has been coming for a long time. There has always been something about your father. It was like he’d built a wall up around himself. Nobody could get in and he couldn’t get out.”

She looked out the window.

“I think this is the answer. This is what he’s been holding in for all these years.” She looked back at me. “This is a new beginning for him. You know I’ve prayed for your dad for so many years, and I didn’t even know what I was praying for. I believe this is an answer to those prayers.”

I couldn’t speak. I knew my voice would crack and tears would spill.

“Ever since you and your dad started having breakfast together, I’ve prayed about your time together. I hoped that somehow your time with him would finally bring peace to him. It just seems like he’s never had peace.”

I didn’t know what to say. I finished a few cookies and left before he got back.