Surviving a Hero

I never met my paternal grandfather.  He was a New York City Fireman and was killed in the line of duty in a Hunts Point fire eighteen years before my birth.  I never met my maternal grandfather either.  He also was in the FDNY, but survived to retire.  He died three years before I was born.

I did get to meet my father, though.  Like the rest of the males in the family, he too worked for the Fire Department of the City of New York.  He died in a Bronx fire when I was three years old with five of his comrades.

Many years have passed since that happened.  In my family, lives have been lived and lost, and had my father survived he would have had quite a time keeping up with his four children and later, his eleven grandchildren.  He would have had plenty of advice, I’m sure, for my own son who became a soldier and police officer.  I can imagine my father regaling him with his own war stories over some drinks at a bar, tapping the back of the barstool as he did (for emphasis), and laughing uproariously at his own jokes.  He would have won their love and earned their respect.  He was just that kind of guy-- Had he lived.

I can see him looking very proud at the graduations of his children, and maybe even making a sideways comment about my choice to become a psychologist.  He would have believed that there was nothing that couldn’t be solved by either a big swat or a bigger laugh.  That’s the way he was. . . .Had he lived.

But, he didn’t make it that far.  He died at the age of forty-one, and we have never stopped missing him.  With all his flaws, he was our hero.