Thank You, Aunt Helen

     We visited Ft. McHenry Memorial Day weekend. Standing there listening to a guide tell about the origins of this holiday, my thoughts wandered back to World War II and my Aunt Helen who served as a nurse in the 12th Evacuation Hospital Unit.  When we entered the war she was working at Lennox Hill Hospital in NYC.. The hospital put together a volunteer medical unit to serve in an active war zone. She was one of the thirty-seven medical staff chosen to go. Her unit  ended up in various places on the other side of the English Channel once the Second Front was established. 

    After the war my aunt came home. She looked tired but after a short rest went back to work at Lennox Hill. Soon she had an ulcer. She came to our house to rest and get better. I heard my parents talk about her not being able to get over the war. In the following years the pattern was repeated and I always heard same comment  "she just can't get ove the war."

   She died at 60 in a Veterans' hospital. Her body could take no more. Her heart was broken. Standing at her graveside I knew  her declining health and death were due in part to never "getting over the war." I was twenty and had no real understanding of what that meant. 

   This spring I read The Paris Wife. The author describes Hemingway's struggle to overcome memories of WWI. Next I read a fictional novel whose hero, an English Inspector at Scotland Yard, carried on a constant internal conversation with a  Scotsman shot for refusing to obey an order very close to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918,  the agreed upon moment to end hostilities in WWI. Reflecting on these two books pushed me to a new understanding of the phrase I'd heard so often, "she never got over the war." 

   Of course not. She saw carnage beyond anything I can imagine. Amputated limbs, bodies torn open, vital organs exposed. Men so badly wounded that she could only cover them until they passed to a "better place." Boys who lay dying still talking of going home to sweethearts who would never see them. Having to smile, give encouragement, and reinforce patients' misconceptions in the face of so much suffering  must have been all but unbearable.

    Part of her survived that war. She laughed, had fun and nursed the sick again, but what she had seen ate away at her until her body could take no more. The tears I shed at her graveside were trying to say, "Thank you, Leiutenent Helen Gertrude Ahern, for being the person you were." I hope it doesn't matter I didn't really understand the courage it took to be the woman who served in that war then. I do now.