How Will They Remember Us?

A friend of mine in Mississippi was once reflecting on how the things people think are the most important about themselves may not be at all how people remember them after they're gone. As in, "Ole Hank, he never was much good. But he sure did love dogs!"

That occurred me today as I saw this article about a 29-year-old California man, Army Sgt. Michael Hancock, who was killed in Mosul, Iraq. It wasn't anything about the politics of the story that struck me. In his last message home, he was repeating the official view of the war. And the article doesn't give many details about how he died.

Instead, it focuses on those he left behind. His widow, Jeannie, has four children (10, 9, 7 and 3). The younger two are Michael's, the older two his stepchildren. This made me think of the painfully ironic description of a character in Herman Melville's The Confidence Man: "in the case of the poor widow, chastisement was tempered with mercy; for, though she was left penniless, she was not left childless."

But what Jeannie recalled for the reporter was how she first met Michael, when he was riding his bicycle and she almost hit him with her car. They later bonded over a cup of coffee, which he didn't really drink much before he met her. Later, when he was separated from her on deployments, he drank coffee to remind himself of her.

His father remembered him this way: "He loved people, he loved Jesus and he loved to ride a bike."

I saw a TV movie years ago, with Robert Mitchum as a World War II American flyer who returned to visit England years later. In the predictable plot, his old British girlfriend had a daughter by him that he never knew about. The daughter is a committed peace activist who has trouble warming to her father. At one point, he's standing with her looking at the graves of soldiers, and trots out the ponderous old clichee of wondering how many Miltons and Homers died there and what they might have contributed to the world.

His daughter responds testily with something like, "Do you really think that's what their wives and parents and children cared about?"

Tags: iraq war, michael hancock