| Jan 27 | My nephew, Eric, was not quite one when his father, Jerry Rose, was killed in a plane crash in Vietnam. Eric grew up with no memory of his father. So, my book THE JOURNALIST brings his father to him. After Jerry’s death, Kay, my brother’s widow, Eric, and his sister Thorina, who was then about 2 and a half, came to live for a while with my parents. The children were sweet—blond and blue-eyed. Thorina overheard adults talking about the plane crash and kept saying “My Daddy go down down down…” Eric was too little to understand what had happened. Through the years, we were a close family. Kay and the children settled in Alexandria, Virginia. We visited one another often, so I got to watch my niece and nephew as they were growing up. My mother died about a dozen years after Jerry’s death. We buried her next to Jerry’s grave. Our family gathered there and read prayers and poems. Eric was about thirteen then, a thin boy with longish blond hair. After our little ceremony was over, I saw Eric leaning on his father’s gravestone and sobbing. At age thirteen, young Eric was crying his heart out for the father he never knew. Eric resembles his father. Like Jerry, he is athletic—Eric is a semiprofessional tennis player and now owns and runs a tennis club. |
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