For some reason, this holiday season, I have been very much focused on family that have passed on and missing all the times in the past that my family was together and enjoying life. I don’t know why I’m so full of these types of memories this year, but I am.

A Texas Summer

Five years old. Kingsville, Texas. Only a little kid, but a summer of trauma I’ll never forget. My older sister says she can’t remember like I do, but I can picture both days as if they just happened rather than being over fifty-nine years in the past.

My parents were young—twenty-six years old with two little girls. One almost seven and one five. Beach days, fun with other servicemen and their families, and even camping on the beach in a blue Rambler American car that had a front seat that folded down to make a comfy bed with the back seat.

Early in the summer, several Navy families decided to spend a day at the beach having fun and planning to cook hamburgers once the sun went down. One family had four sons. Inner tubes were de rigueur that warm summer day and the children played happily in the water for ages.

One boy of the family of four sons was a rowdy child who liked to tease girls. At one point, he floated next to me and shoved my inner tube far away. I paddled my way back to shallower water, but he wasn’t satisfied to be thwarted in his quest to pester me.

He reached over, pressed his hand on my head and shoved me under the water. Struggling, I was able to come up, cling to the edge of the rubber tube, and gasp for air, but before I could get away from him, he did it again.

Spluttering, I came up again, kicking my legs frantically, but he shoved me down again. And again. I lost count after three shoves, but I’ll never lose that feeling of not being able to catch my breath.  

By this time, I’d lost the inner tube and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. All I remember from being down there was a beam of light shining down toward me. I could see it touch the surface through the murkiness of the water. I don’t believe it was the light people say you see when you’re dead or dying. I had no urge to go toward it. I believe it was the sun shining through the water. I never felt like I had a near death experience, even though I was close to drowning.

Luckily, a man was walking past and saw me go under that last time. I have no idea what all the parents were doing as their children frolicked in the water, but the man who came to my rescue was dressed in street clothes and nice shoes and was not someone we knew. He jumped in the water and saved me, but what I remember most about him was his wet money and his brown loafers. He’d gone in, wallet, shoes and everything. What stands out to me when I was back among the living, was watching him dry out his paper money. Weird that I’ve blocked the rest of the day from my mind other than the boy, Joey, not letting me catch my breath, the sunlight shining down on me as I lay under the water and that man’s dark hair, brown shoes, and wet cash. Was he my guardian angel? Or really merely a kind soul passing by who saw a kid in trouble and stepped up to save her?

Less than two months later, the second traumatic day of that long ago summer occurred. My mother’s sister and husband were visiting us in Kingsville. My dad’s eighteen year old brother, Robert, was in boot camp in San Antonio and was looking forward to his military service. All he’d ever wanted to do was be in the Air Force. He was supposed to join us for the weekend while my other aunt and uncle were visiting. He didn’t show up, but Dad didn’t worry as he might not have been given his leave as expected. He was going to come by bus and we didn’t know if something happened there, like Robert missing the bus.

We went to the beach for the day while Dad was at the Navy base where he was stationed. My aunt’s husband was bald and hadn’t put sunscreen on his head. He got a terrible sunburn, and while my sister and I watched, my aunt was rubbing sunburn cream on his head to try to help him with the soreness of the burn. Mom had the television on and a news story came on that an Air Force airman had committed suicide while at boot camp. No name was released pending notice to next of kin, but Mom said, “I wonder if that was Robert. He didn’t come to visit this weekend and I wonder if it was him.”

At the same time we were seeing this on television, my father was called in to his commanding officer’s office to have the news broken to him about my uncle’s suicide. The commanding officer put the duty of notifying their parents of one son’s death on the other son. A very hard task for a young man of twenty-five who was grieving the loss of his sibling. How my dad found the words to say when he was given the phone to call his father is beyond me.

My uncle Robert was a popular, handsome boy who I will always remember as full of life and joy. He was constantly smiling, surrounded by friends and usually had a girl on each arm. His goal in life was snatched away when he hurt his back while in boot camp.

The day he took his own life was the day he’d been told he wouldn’t be graduating from boot camp due to this injury. They were shipping him home and he couldn’t cope with it. The loss of his dream hit him hard. He didn’t reach out for comfort to family or friends. He was too despondent. I sometimes wonder if he didn’t have the right coping skills since things usually came easy to him. Was this his first huge disappointment in life? I don’t know. I was too young. And truly, so was he. Barely eighteen. Makes me sad to think he didn’t know where to turn or perhaps he thought his friends wouldn’t understand.

The “if onlys” game is a hard one to have to play. My dad wishes his brother had called or come and visited and told him of the issues he was having. We were less than a hundred and fifty miles away, but it could have seemed like as far away as the moon to my uncle when he got the news that he wasn’t going to be allowed to graduate from boot camp.

My grandparents never got over their child’s death. The boy who left home a few months prior, full of excitement that he was finally going to realize his dream, was no more. No one in the family understood how or why, really, that this happened. We’d never see that smile or hear that laugh again and we couldn’t believe it.

When my grandmother passed away ten years later from a brain tumor, her Bible was full of scraps of paper and notes to God asking, “Why, why, why?” and, as an adult, it breaks my heart all over again to see those words of anguish that flowed from her pen as she struggled to cope with the loss of her son.

The summer before my sixth birthday will always stand out in my mind no matter how old I get. I’m grateful my life was saved, but I wish my uncle’s had been as well.