A Grateful Remembrance

I’ve been thinking a lot today about my grandmother who passed away at the end of this past August. She was ninety-four years old. She out-lived her husband, my grandfather, by twenty-seven years.

The reason I’ve been thinking about her recently is because her loss is still very recent, and I haven’t quite let that settle into my mind or my heart. And because it’s Veterans Day.

My grandfather was a Marine. He joined the Marines after the bombming of Pearl Harbor. Because I was only thirteen when he died, I didn’t have the chance to ask him about his time in the service.

So many members of my grandmother’s and grandfather’s families were in the service. My grandfather and his brother were both in WWII. My grandmother’s cousins all had husbands in the service, as was my grandmother’s brother. One cousin lost her husband in the war and went…