A special wedding guest. I know it’s not normal to bring an uninvited guest to a wedding, but I’m sure this one will be welcomed. Inspiration hit me last week when I had a bright idea for a gift for John and Meredith. I retrieved my husband’s scrapbook from a squadron tour on USS John F. Kennedy back in the 1970s. Flipping through it, I found two wonderful pictures of my husband and John; in one of them, they were cutting a huge cake celebrating John’s 400th “trap” (arrested landing) on the aircraft carrier in an F-14. My husband was Commanding Officer, a pilot, and John was a Lieutenant, Navy Flight Officer, who flew in the back seat. Obviously, it was a special day. Both pictures are clear and John has a bright, happy smile in them.
We were in Japan in 1984 when the chaplain, a mutual friend, came to our house to tell me the news – John and his pilot, on another deployment with a different ship, had crashed into the Mediterranean. Their bodies were never recovered. His wife, my dear friend, Mary, was in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with their son who was just one. She was devastated.
She quickly discovered that children grieve differently than adults, having to answer John’s ever-changing kinds of questions as he grew up. Eventually Mary remarried a good man and stepfather, yet John yearned to know more about his biological father. Once when I visited with him as an adult, I saw a tattoo on his arm. “What’s that?” I asked, surprised. “It’s the day my dad died,” he answered. It took my breath away. He even piled beer cans up against a wall in his apartment because he saw a picture when his dad was single and did it.
I had the two pictures I rediscovered beautifully framed together and will present the “uninvited guest,” his dad, to him at his wedding.
by Kathleen Vestal Logan, MS, MA October 3, 2018