My Hero

I have been trying to put down my thoughts this weekend and it just isn’t working.

Why? The realization as I was procrastinating getting ready to attend a memorial service for a friend’s son that 3 years ago on Memorial Day weekend I was getting ready to fly to Poland for my father’s funeral. This was six months after he had passed away and we were going to lay his ashes to rest in a military cemetery in his home city.

This of course caused my mind to go back to both the good and painful memories. The times spent together, the times spent in silence. My father and I had a wonderful relationship, when others didn’t cause us to have a bit of a tiff over something stupid. Yes there were years of our lives that we spent hardly speaking and in the end having some of our most insightful and personal conversations as we mended our rift. It was always something stupid that caused it, but never failed that when we did talk things through we would end up closer than ever.

I was always a bit of a tomboy and preferred spending time with my father while he worked on the car or building something than with my mother learning how to cook and clean. Not to say my mother wasn’t talented at the things she would do, they just weren’t things that I was interested in. I learned how to drive from him, and began that learning on a riding mower as I would take my turn mowing the lawn (rider mower was fun except on the part of the yard where you had to be very careful so you wouldn’t roll it on the incline).

To this day I carry the empty shell from the 21 gun salute he was honored with. Memories of wandering his home city and seeing/reading the memorial plaques from WWII that seemed to be on almost every block really brought home the stories I would hear growing up about the fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. This isn’t the fighting from a distance that so often occurs in more modern warfare, this was street to street fighting, I guess today it would be described more as guerrilla warfare as the resistance did what they could with whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Using tunnels and sheltering in the shelled our remains of buildings as they waited an opportunity to hit the Germans.

It made me appreciate more (and regret not listening better) to the many stories my father would tell (and retell) over the years. Being a typical kid, I usually would roll my eyes when he would get into telling tales of the war, thinking ‘here he goes again’. It wasn’t until I was in Warsaw as an adult that I began to appreciate what it had been he was telling. How they gave so much of themselves in an attempt to preserve their home. Their city. Their country. Tales of my father being captured not once, not twice but three times and escaping three times. He bore scars from horrible burns he received defending his city.

So many stories of things said and done over the years that made him my hero long before it really sank in that this man really was a HERO in the bigger sense of the word than just to his daughter. The number of people he touched over the years with the things he did. The sacrifices he endured to make the world a better place. The horrors he witnessed while doing his part to stop the german war machine from taking control.

I will always miss my father, but it is on Memorial Day weekend that it hits me almost as hard as on the anniversary of his passing. I really had intended to write a piece about Memorial Day, about the memorial for my friend’s son, and many other things, however every time I started to write it would drift straight to thoughts of my father.