A Grief Revisited

In September, 1970, I was between college and graduate school.  I and two of my children were at my parents’ home in central Pennsylvania.  On the 12^th, I was getting ready to go to my in-laws to pick up my wife and two of my four children and head toward Philadelphia.  As I was leaving, I saw a military car pull up in front of my parents’ house. Knowing my brother Denny was in the Service, I thought he had been given another award, as was his history.  I decided to stay to find out what it may be all about.  Two officers came to the door and my mother answered.  They inquired as to her name, and if Dennis John Bullock was her son.  She said she was and that he was.  The officer then said simply and directly, your son was killed yesterday in the South China Sea off the coast of Viet Nam.  My mother did what all mothers do.  She sank to the floor saying No! No! Oh No!  In the following days my parents, along with my two other brothers, grieved.  My parents being religious, began to find some comfort by acknowledging their son’s death was somehow the “mysterious” will of God.  I railed against that notion by pointing out that what killed “Denny” was the American paranoia of communist influence in Southeast Asia; the machinations of the military industrial complex, the decision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a five inch shell that killed their son and my brother.  I was much younger then, my head filled with the protests of college during the 60s.  My so-called intellectual maturity was leaning more and more to liberal and progressive ideology.  What I said then, I still believe.  The aforementioned dynamics were true then, and still are – I was right.  However, for a number of years now I have come to know that I was, in fact, wrong.  I had failed to acknowledge my parents’ faith, for which even though more liberal, I hold deep value even now.  I am twelve years older than when my father died and two years older than when my mother died.  I was wrong.  It is one of my deepest regrets that over the years I never clearly indicated to my parents how much I have come to know they were right.  Life and death is a psychological and spiritual mystery and the most honest reality for me is the willingness to acknowledge that mystery by “leaving it up to God.”  The truth is, we don’t know, even as our hearts and minds want and need to “know.”  So if courageous and honest, we go again and again to that only place where deep in us we know we have always been.  The place where the fierce and radical love of God calls us and pulls us – sometimes kicking and screaming – to that place where we say with gratitude and wonder “your will be done.”