My sister called early this morning to tell me that my father is dying. He has Alzheimer’s disease so, in one sense he has been gone for awhile. In another sense, he is only just now leaving. He was able to live at home up until two weeks ago when a blood clot in his leg made it necessary to put him in the hospital. Removed from familiar surroundings he declined quickly.

My father was a veteran of WWII. He was a fighter pilot in the Pacific and, against all odds, for a fighter pilot’s life expectancy was measured in weeks not years, he lived through two tours of duty. I remember only one time when he talked about the war. He said, “It is hard to kill another man when you look into his eyes and you see he is a person just like you.”

Christmas with eight children could be a chaotic event. To keep some kind of order my parents established an unvarying routine: we went to 9:00 Mass at our parish church then home for breakfast. After breakfast we kids were allowed to open our presents.

Sometimes dad stayed around to take Christmas pictures but more often mother took the pictures because dad didn’t feel good. He invariably spent all of Christmas day in bed. Mother said he was sick and had to stay in bed. On December 26th he would be well.

We never knew why Christmas was so hard for dad. What I know is that my mother once said, “You didn’t know your father before the war. He was a happy person, always smiling and joking. We had so much fun together. The war changed him.” My siblings and I used to say that dad hated Christmas. But I don’t believe he hated Christmas. Instead, I believe his inability to enjoy the season, as well as the anxiety and depression that plagued him year round, stemmed from something that happened to him on some other Christmas in some other year. Something he could not talk about.

Today, the 26th of December, 2008, we are in another war and thousands of men and women, are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of their families have sent them gifts and boxes of goodies in the hope of giving them a good Christmas, an “as if you were home” Christmas. Meanwhile, we at home distract ourselves from the carnage of war with stories about GIs saving abandoned pets and zoo animals starving for want of meat.

But in a war zone, Christmas is a day like any other. The fighting goes on. Bullets and bombs find their targets. People are maimed and die.

I am certain that when those men and women return home their families will also find them changed. Some of the things these soldiers have seen and survived will be spoken about openly. Most of their experiences will be locked away in some secret part of themselves, perhaps to be accessed only in nightmares or flashbacks or sickness at Christmas. Families will wonder what happened to the happy-go-lucky person who went away to war. Another generation of children will be wounded by the anxiety and fear that haunt the soldiers who fought the war; having seen how quickly things can change, they fear the unexpected for those they love.

Today, as my father lies dying, I wonder how to spread his words: "It is hard to kill another man when you look into his eyes and you see he is a person just like you."