Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember that today, D-Day, is my Uncle Willy's birthday. I've mentioned this before, here and here. Today he would have been eighty. But he was killed in action two days before D-Day. It seems odd to think of that not-quite-nineteen year old, whom I know from pictures and a few anecdotes (see links above), as King Lear's age -- like JFK at 88. I am named after him. I remember that my twelve-year-old father wrote him a letter before his family got the news (at the end of June, I believe) asking didn't he think it was terrific that D-Day was his birthday? I remember my grandmother telling me, with an awe that in some sense must have compensated for her loss by valuing the living courage to do his duty of my grandfather at a scale like that of the dead courage of my uncle, that my grandfather went back to work three days later. I remember that he got the news first, somehow -- at work? Or was she shopping? Or maybe before my father but not before my grandmother? -- and that he informed her (or my father), with the words "Willy je pao" which means, in Croation, "Willy has fallen."

posted by william 3:12 PM
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