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more distant relative with whom our emotional connections have been settled and we don’t wish to call them into question? If we have forgiven them, as all children must at some point forgive their parents, are we afraid of finding something unforgivable?
In an interesting, parallel event, a colleague from the Department of Surgery last year found, after his mother died, three historic relics from World War II. These were “Log Books” that recorded the operations that his father’s team of surgeons had done between D-Day and mid- December, 1944. A fourth logbook, with records from March through July 1945 turned up later. My friend had no prior knowledge of these records, which shed light on a period of time in his father’s life that his father had never talked about. Although he was reluctant to delve into the logbooks and discover the story they might tell, I was curious to know about surgery near the battlefront in WWII. When I asked if I could borrow them to study, he loaned them to me.
Documents like these open a window into history but also open us to emotional risk. Both of these documents involve war. Both describe events our fathers didn’t talk about. At the same time, my father’s memoir and the surgeon’s logbooks are quite different in their origins and purposes. Both documents require investigations into history to be fully understood in accurate context.
The WWII logbooks were official documentation required by the military. They are unemotional, for the most part, recording in brief the facts of the injuries caused by war. To understand the geographic and historical context of the operations being performed in the field, hospitals required a search for contemporary historical sources with the help of the Internet. Only by supplying historical context does one begin to picture what it must have been like to carry out the tasks that were recorded. Although his tour of duty was almost 3 years, the duration of the entries in the three logbooks I was given is only 13 months. Nevertheless, they might offer insight into how those 3 years might have influenced the writer’s life. I was able to search Army archives on the Internet to learn more about how military medicine was practiced during WWII and integrate the data in the logbooks into that background, rounding out what was at all times stressful, if
not harrowing.
In the case of my father’s memoir, I was looking – at a safe emotional distance – for information about that decade of my father’s life about which I had heard only rumors. And once I opened it and began reading, I found it necessary to undertake research into life in Ireland during the Troubles, not only to give context to his story, but also to try to verify some of what I was finding. The war for independence in Ireland, beginning as the Troubles or “Tan Wars,” raged from 1916 to 1922 and was immediately followed by a two-year civil war, during all of which he was a teenager. The memoir describes his
life in a small, rural Irish town under authoritarian British rule and the predations of the infamous, mercenary Black and Tans, brought in to suppress the rebellion. One can only imagine how his life might have been shaped by his experiences (real or imagined) during this time.
In the course of my research, I ran across a similar pilgrimage undertaken by a college classmate who had come across a trove of “papers in several trunks” many years after his own father’s death. His father, by coincidence, had also grown up in Ireland during the Troubles. Five years older than my father, he had been active in the leadership of the IRA as an organizer and had written three autobiographical books about his experiences, the first one published in the 1930s after he escaped Ireland. These remarkable first-hand accounts describe in detail the physical and emotional trauma he suffered in the rebellion and the civil war. My classmate was a teenager when his father died. I don’t know whether his father ever talked to him about his experiences. My guess is he didn’t. He was too young when his father died to know him well, except through his writings, which because of their very nature impose their own burden. He is presently devoting most of his time to further elucidating his father’s “journey” and promoting its historical significance through lectures and YouTube videos.
All of this might lead one to ask why we undertake these journeys. Is it to create a coherent family history? Is it something we do out of a sense obligation to a parent from whom we discover, 50 years later, documents we didn’t know existed that may reveal the things they never talked about? Is it that in so doing we might gain insights into our own lives? Or is it out of curiosity, a need to unravel a mystery. Why were these events
never talked about?
In our 50th Year College Report, my classmate made the following entry under the subtitle, Dealing with Parental Baggage or History: “Most of us have to deal with what baggage our parents left behind as unfinished business...I would encourage all classmates to take care of their own ‘baggage’ in the way you would like to have it cared for.”
And so, we must proceed, each in our own way. I’m glad I waited. •
Volume 73 • Number 2 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN 17
References
Burney RE. D-Day to December: The Odyssey of the Third Surgical Auxiliary Group in WW II. 2021 J Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, Military Supplement 2021 doi:10.1097/ TA.0000000000003205
O’Malley E. The Singing Flame. 1978 Mercier Press, Cork
O’Malley E. On Another Man’s Wound: A Personal History of Ireland’s War of Independence. 1979 Roberts Rinehart Publishers, Boulder, Colorado