D-Day 1994
The 50th anniversary of the Normandy landing triggered my father’s PTSD—and belatedly set me on the road toward adulthood
My dad wasn’t one of the American troops who took part in Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. His 18th birthday was that August, and though he could have signed up for military service earlier, he opted to graduate high school with the rest of his class in June. He didn’t make it to Europe until early 1945. This was probably lucky for him. But Dad did know people who landed on the Normandy beaches that day, and some of them didn’t come back.
In the spring of 1994, as the 50th anniversary of D-Day neared, Dad started talking about those people, his long-departed schoolmates, for the first time that I could remember. He spoke with difficulty, as if he were being choked. At home in Cambridge, Mass., watching TV news reports about the preparations for the anniversary events in France, he would break down crying. The closer the day came, the more frequent the tears, often unbidden by any visible cause. He began having trouble sleeping. Then trouble eating. Then trouble breathing.
I had just turned 22. I’m pretty sure I’d heard of PTSD by then, but I didn’t make the connection. Dad had told me about his European experiences during and after the war many times with no obvious discomfort. About being an Army radio operator in France and Germany, a master of Morse code; about walking through the rubble of once-great cities; about coming down later with rheumatic fever, which nearly killed him and damaged his heart for life. But there were other stories that he didn’t tell me. It was only years later, via my mother, that I learned Dad had visited a newly liberated concentration camp. Mom also told me later that on the night before V-E Day, Dad sat in the back of a truck next to a fellow soldier who was randomly machine-gunning German civilians on the street—taking advantage of the last few hours when he could add to his personal body count with impunity.
Because I didn’t know this in my early twenties, and because I was a less evolved human then, I reacted to my father’s growing distress with annoyance. What was this crazy blubbering about? It was all in his head, right? Why couldn’t he just snap out of it?
The bath had always been a refuge for Dad, a place to retreat with a good book (wet wrinkled pages were of no concern to him), to soak in warm comforting water and relax. Now he was spending hours in the tub every day, but it didn’t help. His physical and mental health kept declining. Things he said didn’t always make sense. Sometimes he wheezed.
One evening in early June—I don’t recall exactly when—Dad was taking another interminable bath and Mom went to check on him. She didn’t like what she saw. “You don’t look good,” she said. “I’m taking you to Stillman Infirmary right now.” She helped him get dressed and escorted him to the Harvard medical facility, located in what was then called Holyoke Center. Before long, I got a call from Mom. Congestive heart failure. Dad was drowning internally, and he’d need to stay at the infirmary for a while, until the excess fluid had been drained away.
It wasn’t all in his head.
But what was in his head, I believed, had somehow generated what was in his body. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe it was both. Chicken and egg.
I don’t remember how long Dad stayed in the infirmary, but I do remember that his recovery was long and slow. It was also incomplete; he had to go back for further drainage at least twice within the next year. Finally, his doctors decided that more radical action was required, and in November 1995 he underwent a quadruple bypass. This kept him alive, though never completely well, for another eight years.
That late spring night changed Dad’s life for good. And mine.
At 22 I was steadily working toward my bachelor’s degree but still living at home, and my parents showed no signs of wanting to show me the door. Indeed, they appeared entirely content to have me stay in their orbit for the foreseeable future. But Dad’s D-Day breakdown was a sign that the future might not be as foreseeable, or as far away, as we’d thought. And in anticipation of that future, I needed to stop being my parents’ satellite and start creating my own life.
To say that I consciously realized this at the time would be going too far. I simply felt an urgent physical necessity to move. And so, in the days following Dad’s trip to the infirmary, I began spending more and more time away from home. I went on solo voyages to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, places that I’d never gone without my parents or grandparents, as if to prove that they, or I, continued to exist without the presence of family.
Next I traveled to New York a few times, staying with various friends. The city, still mostly new to me, was intimidating in its vastness—was there anywhere in there that the little I could belong?—but the challenge it presented seemed important to face.
It was on one of those journeys that I met a young woman from Cologne. Friend of friends, full of passion for the performing arts, she’d broken away from the medical path that her parents had been charting for her and was now trying to make it as an actress in a foreign country thousands of miles from home. I found her chutzpah admirable and fell wildly in love with her. For the next six months, the two of us embarked on the emotional equivalent of a nonstop ride on the Coney Island Cyclone. It was my first serious romantic relationship, and as she was living in New York, it kept me away from Cambridge even more. Convenient, that. Essentially I was trying to construct a new home, a new family for myself, to replace the old one that was in turmoil. It didn’t work, but the impulse was understandable and, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, all too human.
Looking back on this period from 30 years’ distance and with at least a glimmer of objectivity (or so I’ve convinced myself), there’s something eerily uncanny about the fact that within weeks of my father’s breakdown, triggered by horrors he went through five decades before in Germany, I was finding solace in the arms of a German citizen. Coincidence? Or something deeper? I don’t know.
I do know, however, that in the wake of that relationship, my circumstances changed quickly and dramatically. By the end of the following summer, I was living by myself in a Greenwich Village studio apartment, working as the senior editor of a national music magazine, and going to concerts on someone else’s dime nearly every night of the week (often multiple concerts in a single night). In short order, I’d turned myself from a guitar-playing, freelance-writing college student into a successful, salaried young man on the New York scene. At least that’s how it looked on the surface; inside, I continued to be wracked by loneliness and insecurity. But that too would improve, given time.
My parents understood my need to break free. They helped me with the move from Cambridge to New York as much as they could. They approved of the work I was doing. And they didn’t even seem to mind that I’d put college on indefinite hold 18 credits away from graduation. But I felt a lingering cloud of disappointment around them just the same. I’d left them behind at a critical moment, and that was a cruel cut. I’m not sure it ever fully healed.
Regrets? I have a few. Chiefly, I wasn’t as supportive of my mother as I ought to have been during Dad’s health crisis. Her husband was seriously ill and she could have used a more regular hand from her only child. What can I say? Dad’s sudden deterioration made me angry at first, but I see now that the anger was rooted in fear. As his condition worsened, it became more evident that I was scared. Over the course of a few weeks, a pillar in my life had collapsed; the strength of certainty had turned to deep vulnerability. I was young, I was self-centered, and I didn’t want to confront the specters of sickness and death so close to home. You could argue that I chose denial and escape instead, and I wouldn’t disagree.
But I can forgive myself for those lapses now. In the subsequent decades, I’ve become very familiar with the specters of sickness and death. For the past seven years, they’ve been an inescapable, near-constant presence. It’s not fun. Wanting to run from them is a natural reaction.
I also know that the changes I made in response to the D-Day breakdown were changes that I needed to make. In fact, they were overdue. Most people start making them at least four years earlier than I did—around the age Dad was when he went to Europe. The unusually tight connection I’d had with my parents since birth was beginning to become unhealthy, a barrier to a rewarding life. At some point I had to shift away from being their son and toward being an independent semi-functional adult (a process, I might add, that remains ongoing even as Mom and Dad’s earthly lives have ended). This, for better or worse, was that starting point.
D-Day 1944 began Western Europe’s liberation. D-Day 1994 began mine.
Succinct and very moving, Mac!