This book is about the power of absence. Can we miss people we never even knew?
Susan Johnson Hadler grew up in a middle class family in Oshkosh, Wis., knowing only that her father had been killed in World War II when she was just an infant. Raised by her mother and a loving stepfather, and blessed with a rowdy crowd of younger half siblings, Hadler had a comfortable childhood, a happy marriage and a fulfilling career as a psychotherapist. Yet why did she feel so empty inside? Driven to explore the roots of her own sadness and sense of loss, Hadler began the search for information about her father’s life and his death. The book chronicles her search.
With help from various U.S. veterans’ organizations and a few dusty newspaper clippings, Hadler was able to find men who served with her father in his army unit and at Camp Lucky, in France, where he set out on the mission that killed him in 1944. She visited his fellow soldiers in their homes around the country and attended one of their reunions, gradually building an impression of a young, happy lieutenant who was respected and loved. After much research, she and her husband found the site of the actual mine explosion that took her father’s life. Sitting in a field in France on a sunny afternoon, Hadler was finally able to find peace and closure.
Emboldened by her success at finding her father, Hadler was driven to uncover all the family secrets. She searched out an elderly aunt, who had been abandoned years earlier by the family at a state mental hospital. Against all odds, Hadler discovered her aunt still alive at age 94.
This book is also about the power of silence. Why did Hadler not know anything about her father or her aunts when she was growing up? Why was her mother so secretive about her first family, actively rebuffing Hadler’s requests for information, and at one point, accusing Hadler of “ruining her memories.”
Hadler explores the ways that people use silence to avoid dealing with unpleasantness and with grief, and to manipulate those around them. Ever the obedient daughter, Hadler never blames her mother, though a reader might. Indeed, she seems to view the discovery process, however painful, as a way to get closer to her mother. At times Hadler’s prose veers into oversentimentality and cliché, but her story remains compelling.
