In childhood, we didn’t go to the cemetary on memorial day, since no one from my immediate family was there to be visited, and so the idea of the holiday to commemorate U.S. soldiers lost in battle was somewhat lost on me for decades.  It took many years, as many as I have now lived, in fact, for me to wake up one memorial day morning and ask myself  “who was the last member of my family to fall in battle?” Surely, there were some losses somewhere. My family has been here in the U.S. for a long time — the last immigrant arrival was 1880, and more than one line of descent apparently goes all the way back to the Mayflower — so surely someone served and fell in war.

I reflect: so far the men under 50 in our clan, like Bill Clinton, did not serve, although my father did, between Korea and Vietnam. The last member of the family to see wartime action was probably my great uncle Don, who flew in the Pacific in World War II; and my mother believes that my great uncle Herb must have been the one who brought the German Mauser rifle, said to have been taken from a dead German soldier, home to Minnesota from his tour during the U.S. invasion of Germany, and leave it to my grandfather.

To find an actual fallen soldier in the family, you’d have to go back to 1918, and the Great War. My great-grandfather, George, had been married to a young woman of his home town for long enough for my grandfather to be born when the marriage split up, a terrific scandal in those Edwardian days, and George decided, at the relatively late age of 35, to enlist in the service, to get out of Wisconson and away from everything and everyone there.  He served as leutenant, and is said to have died in March, 1918, somewhere in France, though his body was never found.

I asked my mother about this today, as she visited for dinner on her 70th birthday, and she retold the story. Right away my son chimed in, “if they never found his body, how do you know he’s dead?” he asked.

“He went out, and he didn’t come back,” my mother said, as she ate her birthday cake, “what else could have happened?” Suddenly for some reason, the whole situation seemed hilarious, and she was laughing, laughing helplessly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know, it’s not funny, it’s not. But what were they supposed to think? He was gone.”

My son shrugged, satisfied, wandered off to play somewhere in the living room. She looked around at all of us. “You know, lately on the TV I heard the strangest thing,” she said. “Sure, there were unknown soldiers in the war. But they said that some of the guys who were listed as killed in action actually deserted and stayed in France. They just didn’t want to come back, they started a whole new life there. It occured to me that my grandfather could have done that. He would have had the reasons.”

We looked at each other. No doubt, either way, he was gone by now. But the idea of the alternative tragedies — killed in war, or living as a man without a country, in a foreign land, struck me as poignant. “Does anyone know any more about the story? I asked mom.

“You’d have to talk to my sister, she keeps the family history records.” My mom finished her coffee. “She has it all on a pdf somewhere. She even went to Wisconsin and checked the court records, talked to people.”

I stared at my mother. Suddenly the image of my ancestors flared up, large, living, and mysterious. It was a good way to feel on memorial day, to remember those who served, to respect, and to wonder.