The gray sea looked like glass to the horizon. A terrible storm had hit this coast 71 years ago. Now all that remained were the salty tears on Lucy Gilds’ cheeks.
She gingerly made her way down the path from the bluff to the sea. Her journey was simple compared to her father’s. But she wasn’t dodging bombs and bullets like he did. Going to the sea was easier than coming from it.
Pvt. Lawrence Gild had done it on a Higgins Boat. Spray and vomit stung his face. Lead killed his friends. Blood stained his clothes. He came ashore on Omaha Beach during the second wave. He was near the tip of the spear on D-Day.
Lucy hadn’t known it until March 15, 2015. Her jaw dropped when the lawyer read his final request. Now she was honoring it.
She knew he served in the Army during the war but thought he was behind the lines. At least that was what her mother said. Her mother was a woman full of secrets.
While she loved her father, she knew her mother’s heart belonged to someone else. She had met and fallen in love with a young Marine named Skip Walker.
Lucy had found their yellowed love letters while playing in the attic as a little girl.She held the flashlight and read his last letter. He was fighting on an island somewhere in the Pacific. While her father was storming ashore on Omaha Beach, a Japanese sniper ended Skip’s life.
Part of her mother died that day. The rest died in 1968 when the men in uniform showed up at their front door.
Her brother, a Marine (she remember her father’s anger he hadn’t joined the Army), was shot in the head by a Viet Cong sniper (how cruel that had to be to her mother). She and her parents stood in the cemetery as cold rain fell around them. The moment his coffin entered the earth, her mother stopped talking and started crying. Her mother would cry as her father sat at the kitchen table holding a glass of scotch.
Cancer took her a year later. But Lucy knew that it was a broken heart that killed her. Her father never remarried. A dark chill fell upon their house.
The Greatest Generation was a tortured generation.
Lucy had always thought her father to be cold and unloving. Now she knew the truth. Now she knew demons were haunting him.
Demons born on this beach.
After the war, her father came home, went to school on the G.I. Bill and became a teacher. Mild mannered Larry Gild. Her father retired in 1985 as superintendent of schools. Dementia slowly stole him from her in the late 2000s.
He died in his sleep at the age of 91.
Sleep. That was when the demons normally came. She remembered the screaming she and her brother heard from his bedroom. Her father, like so many of his generation dealt with it by swallowing it. He suffered from what was now known as PTSD.
Lucy took her shoes off and felt the sand under her feet. She quickly crossed the beach (something her father was not able to do) and walked into the surf. There she opened a small container and pulled out a bag of ashes.
Tears hit the water as the ashes touched the sea. After a lifetime of war, her father finally found peace.