Honor, and 58 years

For the last several months, I've been trying to put into words my emotions upon learning of another soldier's death in Iraq. But each time, I could not find clarity and elegance enough to meet the challenge of expressing my condolences and sorrow. Unfortunately, now the dying is continuing, and I have had time to reflect and though maybe this is not clear or elegant, I hope it is not too late.

My grandfather, Henry McKellar, won the Silver Star in World War II. One of the highest honors in our military, Henry received it as a medic, killed in the line of fire while trying to save the life of another soldier. And it is an honor to be his grandson, an honor to know how far his commitment to this country would take him.

I was lucky to have a grandmother who could bring him to life for me through her stories and her obvious love for him. As a result, I do feel like I know him, even though he died nearly 30 years before I was born.

Still, war, a decision made from above, whether just or not, takes a life with such immediacy and throws it's living victims into an abandoned new world of uncertainty. The cold, hard reality is that at one moment, Henry was braving fire to save a fallen comrade, and the next he was stricken by death's grip. In that moment, according to the social construct of "war", my grandfather entered the world of "honor" and "courage." But to us, grandaddy just left this world. He never held his wife or daughter again, he never reached down to take the hand of one his grandsons, nor did he set foot on his native soil of South Carolina.

And in his death's wake, were left my grandmother and my mother - then 3 years old. The sum total of the devastation that Henry's death caused my family can be summed up simply...58 years.

That's how many years my grandmother lived without the love of her life, that's how long she had to mourn. How long my mother had to live with a family no longer whole. Not a day went by that either didn't think about him. Both have given me much to love, but the truth is, I never knew the women they might have been, just as I never knew the man my grandfather would have been. "Honor", frankly, is a grossly inadequate substitute for the possibility of life's future. And the lost love that remains after a loved-one dies early, while strong, sears the heart as much as warms it.

My grandmother had the courage to live the life she had, she taught school for 30 years, she raised a very strong mother in her own right, she found ways to make the lives of others brighter by baking cookies, growing flowers, and demonstrating her wealthy appettite for living. But grammommy lived to her last day tragically apart from the life she had hoped to lead with Henry.

There are monuments to the war dead in almost every town in America, such is war's reach. It spreads, certainly not evenly, but thoroughly across the land. These monuments and salutes to the honor and courage of the fallen which are offered up, as they ought to be, as a salve to the bitter sting of short lives and tragic deaths.

However, we should not let our honoring cause us to leave unrecognized the sacrifice left behind. Leaders of every war have sought to bolster support for this carnage, by reminding us to pay homage to the fallen. However, the fallen are only part of war's lost.

The rest are symbolized, not by body counts, nor by monuments. Instead, they are living in a world that has been so completely, utterly and profoundly changed - a new struggling growth from a barren field of possibilities immolated by the stinging heat of loss.

In 58 years of mourning, my grandmother honored her husband, her love, and she did it with pride and grace.

But, make no mistake, it was a sentence. With each death abroad, comes imprisonment at home. Children never know their parents, parents never see their grandchildren, and the spouse faces the cruelest fate of war - making life work now that the person they had intended to make it with has been taken by decisions out of their control.