A Thanksgiving Day Gift from Heaven

No one in the family wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving that year. We weren’t in any kind of festive mood, and the thought of cooking and eating a big meal wasn’t something we were looking forward to. My father had died just two weeks earlier. But we still had young kids in the family. And for their sake, we decided to keep life as normal as possible.

My sister, Ellen, and I both lived in Connecticut at the time.  She got to my mother’s house in New York before I did.  By the time I arrived, she and my mother were sitting at the dining room table talking.  My mother was crying. I always hated it when my mother cried – and, as of late, she cried a lot. On top of my own grief, I couldn’t handle it. So, I left.

Not knowing where else to go, I drove to the cemetery to visit my father’s grave.  I hadn’t yet seen the stone that was installed three days earlier.  Along the way, I stopped at the local grocer’s and bought two bouquets of roses – one for my mother and the other to lie in front of my father’s gravestone. My mother loved roses.

I hope this will help cheer her up, I thought, laying them on the front seat of my car.

The cemetery was littered with leaves and twigs and other debris that had fallen and blown about during the heavy rainstorm the night before. I bent down and cleaned up the mess around my father’s beautiful new stone. Now the area around it looked barren and empty – the grass hadn’t yet started to grow in. 

In the spring, I will plant some daffodils and daisies. By then there will be grass.  

When I was done cleaning the area, I stepped back to have a look at my handy work and noticed the WWII plaque that was added to the stone. It wasn’t the one my mother picked out It simply read, ‘Veteran U.S. Army.’ It didn’t have my father’s name on it, the war he served in, his rank, or his date of birth and date of death.

I will take care of that in the spring too, I promised myself. But I never did.

My father was in the 2^nd Armored Division. Hell on Wheels. He was a corporal, and drove a Sherman Tank. He played the piano in a band, and with the help of some of his buddies in his battalion, he stole a piano. They hoisted it up on the back of the truck, and while my father played some of their favorite tunes, they laughed and sang for a brief while driving down the desolate bombed out streets of Normandy. When they later came upon a truck that had broken down, they hurled the piano over the side of the truck to the ground below to take on the additional men. It was my father’s favorite wartime story – one of the very few he ever told. He saw many atrocities during the war and survived multiple air strikes when some of his buddies didn’t. He deserved more than the simple plaque he got. But I was happy that he got a 3-volley salute and taps played at his funeral. It was something he had always wanted, and I made sure he got it.

As I was contemplating my father’s plaque, something next to the gravestone moved. There was no breeze and things in cemeteries don’t just move on their own.  My eyes darted curiously to the right.  Kneeling down alongside the stone was the shadowy form of a man. It was my father.

He was dressed in attire I had never seen him wear before – from a time before I was born.  1950s, I thought.  He appeared to be about thirty-five – the age when he and my mother got married.  He was thin and handsome then.  Why is he kneeling down? I wondered. Could it be so I’d be sure to see him while I was looking at his stone?  This wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. My father knew I was there, and he was trying to get my attention. I was so bewildered by this that I never thought to ask him why he had come. And I lost yet another opportunity to say good-bye to him and tell him how much I loved and missed him. Somehow, I hoped he knew. At the hospital, in the hours before he died, I couldn’t bring myself to say good-bye to him. I was too busy sitting in the chapel, praying for a miracle – I wanted him well and home in time for the holidays. When I begged him to go back on dialysis, my ninety-five-year-old father said, “I’m tired.” Three days later, my hero was gone.

My father was 45 when I was born – I never saw him looking so young. And while I knew the man kneeling before me was my father, he looked like a total stranger. With tears now streaming down my cheeks, I realized that although I had spent fifty years of my life with this man, I had missed some of the best years of his life. I would have loved to have known this much younger, dashing looking man from a gone by era.

As I watched him watching me, he was cradling a baby swaddled in a blue blanket. A boy, I surmised because of the color of the blanket. My father rocked it back and forth in his arms, giving it loving care and attention. There was a look of joy on his face that I hadn’t seen in many years.  “Pop, why are you holding a baby?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He looked down at the baby and then back at me. He smiled, and they both disappeared.

I stood at his graveside a long time. What on earth was that all about? I wondered.  I wanted to run back to my mother’s house and tell her and Ellen what had happened.  But I hesitated.  They were in so much pain. We all were. And I didn’t want to make their pain any worse. Whether they would even believe me or not, I didn’t know.  And if they did believe me, I didn’t know how my mother would feel about my father coming to me and not her. My mother and I had a funny relationship. Until the time was right, this would have to remain a secret.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby my father was carrying. He had come for a specific reason. That reason was the baby. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I had to find out. Gingerly.

By the time I got back to the house, the rest of the family had arrived for Thanksgiving dinner.  The house was full, as it was every year.  Someone turned on a football game, and John, my brother-in-law, made the stuffing, as he always did, and tended to the turkey. My mother was preparing one of my father’s favorite holiday dishes, creamed onions. She made it for him every year for as long as I could remember. Ellen was busy setting the table for dinner, and the kids played Yahtzee on the floor – a game they had often played with my father.  It wasn’t the time to talk about the cemetery, my father, or a baby.

With my family all seated around the holiday table, talking and laughing, and remembering my father with fondness, I ate my dinner in silence. I was too caught up in my own thoughts. And too afraid I’d inadvertently say something about the scene at the cemetery. Fortunately, with so many people at the table, no one even noticed my reservedness. Throughout dinner, the conversation revolved around stories about my father. The wonderful memories. The funny things he did. And his peculiar habits. I was dying to tell everyone my story. The longer I held it in, the harder it got for me to stay silent. But until I could figure it all out, I had to remain silent – not an easy thing for me to do.

This was the first year ever that my mother didn’t make her delicious apple pie for desert. We politely ate the pumpkin pie my sister-in-law bought at the grocery store. After dinner, and exhausted from laughing at the plethora of stories and memories my father left behind, Ellen and I went to the kitchen and did the dishes. My mother retreated to her bedroom and took a nap. The rest of the family went into the living room and watched a football game on TV. Throwing caution to the wind, I decided to seize the moment.

“I saw something strange at the cemetery today.”

“What?  Is the grave stone okay?  They just installed it the other day. Does it look nice?”

“It’s fine. I like it. It’s a nice color.” Ellen had picked out the rose-colored stone with my mother.  It stood out among all the grey stones that surrounded it.  “I saw pop while I was there.  He was holding a baby.”

The dish my sister was washing fell into the sink. A look of disbelief came over her face. She steadied herself, taking a minute or two to process what I had said.  “Ellen, are you okay?”

“Wha – what did he say?” she asked cautiously.

“He didn’t say anything,” I said, surprised that she didn’t say I was crazy. “I only saw him for a moment or two and then he disappeared. But he was definitely holding a baby. I didn’t know what to make of it.  Still don’t. Why would he come holding a baby?”

“When you walked in today, mom and I were talking about the baby they had before we were born. It was stillborn.”

“What? They had another child? I didn’t know that. Why didn’t they ever say anything about it before?”

“Too painful, I guess. They had five children, Lorrie. Not four. And she said she always thinks about him. Even to this day.”

“Him? So, it was a boy?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe they never said anything about this before. When I walked in, mom was crying. Why was she so upset?”

“She wanted to know if pop was with the baby in heaven.  She didn’t get a chance to tell him to take care of it until she got there.” Frozen. Silent. And completely dumbfounded. Now it was I who had to steady myself and take several minutes to process what I had just heard.

And it suddenly all made sense. The baby. The clothes from the 1950s. The rocking back and forth.  My father, a young man again, was caring for the baby boy he and my mother had lost more than sixty years earlier – my brother.  My father hadn’t come to comfort me.  He came to comfort my mother, and to let her know he heard her request, even though she never got the chance to make it.

“Do you think pop heard mom and me talking about the baby? And do you think he went to the cemetery to show you that he was caring for it until she got there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Whatever happened today, I think God has given us a rare gift. He allowed pop to come and deliver a very important message. One intended to soothe a broken heart. Now who’s going to tell mom?”


by Lorrie Lush

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