January, 2006
Updates, ID packets, choices, and revelations:

By popular demand – or should I say demanding readers, I can report that the saga of Team Estill continues. Early this month, I was visited by two Army Casualty officers who delivered my father’s official identification packet.

The packet was a review of the entire process of discovery and recovery, comprehensively prepared by JPAC. I’ve often marveled at how huge stories and events laden with emotion and drama, eventually evolve into flat facts. My father’s identification packet is a stellar example of this evolution. Between two black covers and an ordinary spiral binding (the Army could use me as a creative presentation consultant), is the story I helped create and lived to tell. Though most of the information was familiar to me, some of it was revelatory. I hadn’t realized that we found a piece of his uniform, for instance, and that the maps I watched the archeologist draw in the field would become stunning computer versions of themselves.

My current task is determining a date for my father’s funeral in Arlington National Cemetery. In October, the squadrons gather there during for their next reunion. I want to have the funeral during that time so the guys my father flew with can have the option of attending. A reception/gathering/Irish wake will be held at Arlington the night before the funeral with the full military service scheduled for the next day. Dates are yet to be determined but I’ve requested a Friday night and Saturday morning in early October.

The actual service will include, with proper advance planning, a casket brought to the burial site on a caisson (remember JFK?), escorted by an Army band and an honor guard. We will have a Catholic funeral mass and possibly the thing I’d love most: a fly-by of military jets in the missing man formation.

My friend, former member of the U.S. Navy band, and now-famous jazz trumpet player, Tracey Hooker, has offered to come from Olympia to play taps as he does every summer night at our marina. This is the stuff I love. Especially, when I’m told not to expect to have it all. The only thing I left off the list is the fly-over of a lone P-38 Lightning. THAT would be having it all! There are many small details, decisions, and organizational choices to be made. I could leave it all to the Army Casualty office, but this is understandably difficult to relinquish even into expert hands. In the end, this is simple compared to what it took to get here. The sound you will hear at Arlington in October is that of the circle closing.

Along the way, I always hoped, and on some level knew, this day of planning would arrive. In fact, I counted on it without knowing what would be expected of me or what would be provided. As it turns out, everything is provided by the government, and my remaining task on behalf of my father is to choose dates, invite guests, design programs, and determine the mode of burial. I think I’ve written about my vision of collecting my father from the field in Germany and bringing him home. When the vision becomes reality it involves the practicality of caskets and urns – bronze or wood, caisson or hearse. Now or later?

I realized when I returned from Germany, according to protocol, without my father’s remains that I wanted him here with me before his final burial in Arlington. Therein lies the symbolic sense of completion and restoration – for him and for me. There’s also a proprietary feeling associated with this accomplishment. I am, in essence, claiming my father and assuming my role as his daughter by expressing these wishes and having them granted. I learned that daughters attend to these things when I made similar arrangements in 1991 for my adopted dad. I had the same daughterly inclinations and protective feelings. This is the stuff of eventual flat facts that define my experience of father-loss.

In the months since my return from Germany, I’ve been writing an article (among other things) about the search for and recovery of my father’s crash site. Literary editor, John Parsley has created an appropriate and interesting on-line publication, The LOST Magazine: Where Loss is Found. LOST can also be found at http://www.lostmag.com/ and I am excited to report that my article will appear in the March issue.

Work continues on the Der Spiegel documentary. The crew who filmed my father’s repatriation ceremony in Hawaii in October was so moved by the experience that the length of the film has been increased and actors will be used in re-creation scenes. We will meet again at Arlington Cemetery in October. Release of the film to the German and U.S. markets is scheduled for after the funeral and final edits. All preliminary reports from the Der Spiegel group indicate that they are very pleased and enthusiastic about what they have filmed so far.

What remains for me to decide is whether I will return to Hawaii and escort my father’s remains home or if he will return with a military escort. If I escort his remains, we are limited to a wooden urn because of airport security and concerns about civilians with impenetrable metal containers. If a military escort is involved, a metal container isn’t a problem. I’ve decided that a military escort makes sense but that I’d like him or her to be a member of the excavation team from Germany. Hopefully, one of them is just hanging around Hawaii with a few spare days to bring my father to me. Put that possibility squarely in the symbolism column.

Life continues post-Germany and is directed toward writing the end of this father-story chapter but not the end of the story. As long as someone wants to hear it, read it, or paint it, it remains a viable part of me. I hear the word closure these days as in presuming I will soon have it. Usually I am polite and agree that closure is eminent. The truth is my educated and instinctive guess is that closure is elusive and probably non-existent. New stories, like connected memories, are already appearing. I learned, for instance, that I may be able to buy the house where my father and his siblings were born and raised – the house my great grandparents built in 1910 - my Nana’s house. It would, if nothing else, be preserved and would provide a comforting place for Estill family visits. All 12 cousins and their innumerable cousin-kids could make new memories in that sweet old house.

In my experience, closure gives way to new interconnected versions of the same theme. As for this daughter’s story, my father’s return to me and then to Arlington, will write the final chapter of his life. Nothing could be written without knowing what happened in Germany in 1945. The rest is symbolism and ceremony. My father deserves those things and more and so do I.

As things progress, I will post them here.