Editor’s Note: It is Veterans Day, and one of contemplation. There have been two nights of protest in the streets about the election, some of them violent. I knew this wouldn’t be over, even with the results seemingly final. They were not interrupted by attacks, cyber or terrorist, and there few reports of anything but civility at the polling places. We will see how this transition goes, and that may have contributed to a similar mood I felt in 2012, the year I lost Mom, Dad and our pal Mac. It was not a good year. I hope the next few pass in a much more tranquil fashion, though I have my doubts on that score. For you Vets out there (and particularly our Marines, who all had a birthday this week) I will utter the cliche I don’t use any day but this one: “Thanks for your service.”

– Vic

Billie and Mac

(Billie and Mac at their wedding in 1948, after the end of WWII. Photo Mac Showers).

I appear to have made it to Friday, a Veteran’s Day in a very strange election week. I think I did. I got up early because I went down early, once dinner was done and the dishes cleaned up. I was going “to read” in bed and that did not seem practical once the old gray head hit the pillow. I was out before nine, I think.

To help with compiling the notes about Mac’s last career- caregiver and support-group volunteer- I have a large picture of Mac’s wife Billie set on the computer as a screen-saver. She was a hypnotic beauty, and when I look up at the screen from the keyboard where I still hunt and peck my way forward, there she is, nearly big as life.

(The photo of the lovely Billie that is haunting me this week. Photo Mac Showers).

I never met Billie, but I am sure I would have liked her. She passed a decade ago, around the time Mac and I struck up my white-wine fueled Boswell role about his life’s story. She had been suffering from the ravages of dementia for twenty years before that, ten years at home with Mac taking car of her until that began impractical. She had been institutionalized thereafter at the Lutheran Home in the early 1990s, which is when Mac really launched his third career as a volunteer to help people dealing with the two things that he had: Alzheimers and Cancer.

Anyway, she isn’t accusing me of anything with those lovely sloe eyes, but she is reminding me I have to get on with it and get the issue done.

Plowing through the morning stuff regarding the election, I saw a couple notes about the fate of the Republic, and one particularly poignant rendition of the Star Spangled Banner as a tribute to those who served and sacrificed for this great nation. It helped refine my ideas about the Great Interface between being here and not being here.

The peculiar circumstance of my parent’s coincident departure earlier that year is a case in point. Dad had gone downhill to the point that the management at Potemkin Village Assisted Living said he needed the next level of care, and he would have to be moved to the nursing home across the Bay. Mom stayed on in the apartment alone, accepting my story that Dad was traveling on business, which in a way, he was. I had just returned to the District from a visit there, ready to start the New Year.

I got call early on the 3rd of January, informing me that Dad was shutting down. I told the Doc I would be there as soon as possible, and he brusquely informed me that I would not make it in time. I made the round of calls to the family, and had just completed them when I got another call informing me he was gone. So, the next round of calls of notification. I completed that and got a call from Potemkin Village.

Jackie had become a friend along the sad road we travled after getting them out of their home and into the apartment. She said: “I am afraid I have some bad news.”

“I know. Dad passed away just after lunch.”

“No,” she said slowly and then hurled me the lightning bolt that almost caused the phone to fall from my hand. Mom had been found on the floor of her closet after lunch, apparently collapsing suddenly as she was apparently changing clothes to go out. She never went out. And Jackie told me she had not been informed of Dad’s death. I don’t even try to unravel that one, and just accept that Bill came back to get Betty for the next stage of the journey.

Mac’s own decision to leave was in keeping with his whole life. The doctors presented him the options, and he selected the best alternative. It was a conscious decision to let things take their course and take the long dark train out of town when the time came with dignity. That was in keeping with his last great cause- helping people to deal with the 36-hour day that caregivers live with patients confronting Alzheimers.

He certainly helped me.

I am familiar with causes- one of Mac’s last one’s was to secure the award of the Distinguished Service Medal to Joe Rochefort, the code-breaker whose medal after the Battle of Midway was denied by a cabal of ambitious careerists back in Washington, who stole the credit for his brilliant analysis of Japanese intentions. Acting on Joe’s recommendations, Fleet Admiral Nimitz threw everything he had at the Japanese and came away with the greatest Naval victory since Trafalgar.

“Fortuna audaces iuvat,” goes the old Roman quote. Fortune favors the bold.

Another cause was the one that fixated the late Admiral Rex before his passing. He was determined to make a significant memorial to the only Intelligence professional to be captured and executed by the Viet Cong, CDR “Jack” Graf. Rex accomplished his mission before he left, even if there are some details unknown that will haunt me.

So, between the photo of Billie and and the memories of Mac that flood back reading all the notes, this is all quite a surreal Veterans Day.

If I get the Quarterly done, put away that picture of Billie, and get on with the business of business, things will be fine.

Putting some other files together in the interest of accomplishing that, I found this image. It was taken on a fine early Spring day. I was driving Mac in the Bluesmobile to the funeral of the son of a shipmate, an officer who was a casualty of the war in Iraq. Driving past Section 66 at Arlington National Cemetery, he pointed to where Billie is buried, and where he would lie someday.

“She is keeping the place warm for me,” he said, laughing.

(Mac looks down the row in Section 66 at Arlington National Cemetery. That is where we visit him now on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com