“You never really stop grieving. There will always be a part of your heart for them.” – Patrick Dulin (my father) 

Grief is a universal experience. In the United States alone, an average of 13 million people grieve the death of a loved one every year (U.S. Census Bureau via TherapyOakPark.net). 72% of people report that the first 12 months after a loved one’s death are the most intense, and afterwards the feelings subside significantly (Eterneva.com). But do they ever go away? 

My dad was 22 when his father (my grandfather) died. I never knew my grandfather, but I grew up with my father telling me his father’s war stories from WWII. He told me his father was usually “in his cups” when he told these stories, which were often injected with gallows humor, and my dad thought they were mostly full of blarney. Still, my dad was inspired by these stories to join the military himself and make a career out of the thing his father was most proud to have done. Since he was in his 30s, my dad has dreamt of travelling to Europe to trace my grandfather’s footsteps in WWII and see the places where all of these stories originated, connecting the dots between the real history of the battles with what his father told him. At the age of 73, my father finally got to make this trip. He researched the battles my grandfather was in, writing his own booklet of the events and hiring a guide to take the family around Normandy to every spot. 

I wondered why he went to all this trouble -to find these minute details and see the exact spots, and I remembered a story my father told me once. It was a few years after my grandfather died, and my father, who was in the military at the time, had to spend Christmas day deployed on a naval ship. He was in bed, reading a book composed of General Patton’s papers from WWII, and one of the stories lined up exactly with a story his father used to tell. These papers were published well after his father told the stories – there’s no way my grandfather could have copied them. The hair stood up on the back of my dad’s neck, and he heard my grandfather say, “See, I wasn’t that drunk.”