Thread by @JaneLindholm

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother Rita lately. There are so many things about 2020 I’d like to get her thoughts on.

Here she is, on what was clearly a fancy occasion. The picture just over her shoulder is her husband, Arthur, off at war.

They eloped in Portland, Maine, in October of 1943. Soon afterwards, 18-year-old Arthur was assigned to permanent duty on a submarine. In the summer of ‘44, he was stationed in San Francisco.

Rita went out to be with him. And for the rest of her life she talked about San Francisco as if it were magical. Evenings, when Arthur could get time off, they’d walk arm in arm around the city, imagining their future together after the war.

In the fall, Arthur shipped out to the Pacific Theater. Rita went back to Maine, returned to her job at the department store. She wrote to him daily; he wrote when he could. On April 15th, 1945, she felt something shift in the pit of her stomach as she was writing.

If you don’t make it back, she wrote to him, I’ll always know how much you loved me.

Word finally arrived two weeks later: Arthur’s submarine had been sunk. He was missing, presumed dead.

His letters kept arriving for weeks. She kept checking the date, hoping one would be postmarked after the 15th. After a while, there were no more letters.

In 1946, Rita married Ramon, my grandfather. He, too, had been in the war, serving in the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters aboard the destroyer, USS Benson. He was in Tokyo Bay during the formal surrender ceremony. He told me he could see the officials on the Missouri from his ship.

Their courtship was brief, and not as romantic. I think about how much grief they must both have been carrying. But they forged a marriage that lasted more than 60 years. Through the stillbirth of their first child. And then through the joys of 3 more children, and grandchildren.

They always had food on the table for their kids, something my grandfather couldn’t say about his own childhood. And they had love. A different love than Rita’s first experience with Arthur, but what she found with Ray was deep and flawed and meaningful. And I loved them.

I’ve been keeping all three of them I in mind—Arthur, Rita and Ray—as we mark Veterans Day. Thinking about the sacrifices they made. About the ways their lives were changed (or ended) because of war. And about the life they helped build for me and others.