I can tell you the answer to this question. I can tell you the answer because, when I was a child of two, my father died and, when I was nine, my father's mother - the person I loved more than any other person in this world - also died.
My mother didn't believe children should attend funerals; therefore, I attended neither my father's nor my grandmother's.
I grew up with only a tiny scrap of memory of my father who was an Army Non-Com - a veteran of both WWII and the Korean Conflict and a former Merrill's Marauder. When people asked me about my parents and I told them my father was deceased, they would say they were sorry. I would always reply that they needn't feel sorry for me because I didn't really remember my father and never felt a true sense of loss about him.
I lived for 50 years with that opinion...
For some reason which I cannot, even now, explain, I decided to take flowers to my father's grave one Memorial Day. I'd never been to visit his grave in my entire life but, this particular Memorial Day, I was determined to go.
My mother had always told me my father was buried in Golden Gate Cemetery and, so, on the Friday before the Memorial Day of my fiftieth year of life, I called Golden Gate Cemetery to find out the exact location of his grave. To my amazement, I was informed that my father was not buried there and, after checking with the Veteran's Administration, I discovered that my father was actually buried in the Presidio Army Cemetery in San Francisco.
So, early on that Memorial Day morning, I set out on the 60-mile journey from my house to the Presidio. Eventually, I found my way to the top of a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay where the cemetery is located and - armed with the plot number of my father's grave - I searched row by row until I found it on the very end of a row right next to the street.
I parked my car, got out and paused for a moment to take in the view...
I could see Alcatraz Island below me and the Marin Headlands beyond as the fog was just beginning to creep over the Golden Gate Bridge.
"He's probably got the best view in all of San Francisco", I thought to myself.
Standing before his grave - still holding the flowers I brought with me in my hand - I read the words chiseled on the uniform, white, marble stone. There were my father's first, middle and last names, his rank, the state in which he was born and the division of the Army to which he belonged.
That's when it hit me: My father was really dead. That was HIS name carved with brazen finality into the stone. There could be no mistake... My father was irretrievably, totally and undeniably dead.
I remember falling to my knees beside my father's grave and burying my face in my hands as I sobbed, uncontrollably, for what seemed like an hour.
After all this time, all these years, I suddenly realized there was a little two year-old girl buried deep down inside my mind who, up until that very moment, still believed with all her heart that, someday, her father would come back to her.
I remembered things I hadn't thought about since I was a child: How, at one point, I'd told myself my father wasn't really dead, that he'd run away from my mother and me and my mother had been keeping the truth from me to spare me the pain of his abandonment. How, at another time, I'd toyed with idea that my father was some kind of secret agent and the government had faked his death so he could carry out his missions in anonymity.
All of the silly, childish scenarios I'd made up in my young mind in order to keep from having to face the awful, final, irrevocable truth: My father was dead.
Doubled over with grief, crying on the grass of the Presidio Cemetery, I realized that, beneath a half-century of life, there was a little girl who still clung to a dream of what it would be like on the day when her father knocked on her front door, identified himself and claimed her as his child. A little girl who imagined how she and her father would cry in each other's arms as he hugged her tightly, told her how much loved her and how sorry he was for having been separated from her for such a long time
To her, it must have seemed as though her father just went off one day and never returned. I'd never even known that little girl existed but, she DID exist. She was just as real as I was.
Never given the opportunity to grieve over my father's death, I'd never cried or mourned. In her attempt to shelter me from the 21-gun salute, the folding of the flag draped over my father's casket and the lone bugler playing "Taps" as they lowered my father into his grave, my well-meaning mother had taken away any chance I might have had at the time to process through my grief and start the mending process.
In seeking to "spare" me, my mother hadn't really spared me at all. What she did, instead, was delay, by fifty years, my own personal journey through the grief.
The following Memorial Day, I went to visit my grandmother's grave...