My father was too young for WWI and my grandfather was a recent immigrant from Sweden where he had been a captain in the Swedish army. Both were victims of WWI without ever having served. My grandfather was a foreman in a steel mill in East Chicago, IN where, I presume, he came into contact with returning soldiers in 1918 who had contracted Spanish Influenza. He died of that pandemic in his mid 30’s leaving my father an orphan at age 13, his mother having died several years before in childbirth.

My dad was tossed around from one Swedish family to another, settling in with one foster family where he always played second fiddle to the family’s one child. The boy grew up and left for sunny Texas where he practiced architecture. My dad took care of my foster grandmother until the day she died.

He made the most of it, but a heart attack at 55 rendered him unable to work very hard and he was the sole proprietor of a small headstone company, so very little money came into the family. Ultimately, given his life experiences and his ethnic background, he chose the Swedish way of coping; he committed suicide when I was seventeen.

You might call it all collateral damage, a term that applies to me, too, as I, a man of 70, have lived as a child of suicide lonely for his father, the man to whom I never had the chance to say “I love you. Good bye.”