50 years have passed since I lost my 19-year-old brother in a far-away war very few of us young adults understood. I was twenty when Frank died and at the time, too young to understand the Vietnam conflict that started when I was seven. Frank was six in 1955 when it all began and would die there in 1968.
Alice and Frank 1956
I have had a lifetime now to get to know my other siblings, witnessing who they’ve become—something Frank never got to do in his short stay on this planet. My brother has been missing from the larger portrait of our family as years passed. We talk about all the crazy things he did, how much food he could consume as a young boy, the girlfriends and the trouble he got into, but there are all those missing things he never got to experience and which we did not get to see or share. He stays forever young in our remembrances as we grow old but what would he have done with his life? Who would he have become as he grew older?
We will remember and talk more about him as we gather this weekend.
Love and Light Michael Francis!
May 27, 2018 at 9:03 am
This is a beautiful tribute of Uncle Frank and his never ending importance to the Deeny clan!
May 27, 2018 at 11:24 am
Frank was gone way too soon. Being eternally young in the memories of those who love us can be painful. My brother was quite young when he passed away and there was no more reason for him to have been lost, than for Frank to have passed in that horrific, far away, war, which few of us understood. I often wonder what my brother would have been like, so I know about the hole in your heart, and the wishing there had been more time and the unreasonableness of losing him. I hope you and your family have a wonderful time remembering him…and re-living who he was. That he is so loved is a tribute to him.
May 31, 2018 at 6:26 pm
May his memory always be with you as a blessing.