The Everyday Heroism of Dad

Carmelene Melanie Siani

50plus Magazine

 

 

“War is hell,” he would tell me.

 

During the two years before my dad died, my family and I agreed it was best my dad move to Tucson, so he wasn’t living alone in Phoenix. I would take him out to lunch or go over to his little apartment at the assisted living place or take him to his doctor’s appointments.

 

He would tell me things — stories he had never told me before. “War is Hell” was one of them. In this story he finally told me that when he went back into a burning ship to save his buddy he didn’t deserve a medal for it. “What the hell, I was gonna die anyway,” he said.

 

How many times have we heard vets say the same thing. “I wasn’t a hero. The guys who died, they were the heroes.”

 

I remember once when I was about six, dad had taken me and my sister to our regular Saturday afternoon movie when suddenly the smell of smoke permeated the air. Just as the audience began to react, I turned to look for my dad.

 

“Sit down! Sit down!” “Don’t panic. It’s only smoke. Everybody sit down!” There was my dad, up on the stage, bringing order to the people in the theater seconds before they became a panicked mob. “Everybody Sit. Down! Keep. Calm!”

 

Momentarily, the manager of the theater came running onto the stage. The popcorn machine had caught on fire. Everything was under control.

 

The audience broke into applause for my father.

 

That’s what I’d like to do when I think of that real, quiet, nobody-noticed-but-us thing he did when he went to the nursing home every single day and sat with my mother — feeding her, dressing her, talking to her in Italian for the entire 10 years that Alzheimer’s squeezed the life out of her.

 

I’d like to break into applause for that man. The one who suffered from “shell shock” and whose tenderness had ultimately been broken by the “War is Hell” stories he had been through, and who, despite his brokenness, was still able to do really heroic things.

 

Anchors Aweigh, Dad.