A meandering tribute to my dad's parents, with a nod to the collection of family histories and a wink to interesting coincidences

Only a few days after my Grandpa passed away, my dad's whole family assembled in Clearwater, Florida to pay our last respects to the man who held a large portion of the responsibility for our collective existence. It was the first time that the whole clan had gotten together in several years, since my grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary.

At this point, it was difficult to get everyone in the same place at the same time; the five children were spread far and wide throughout the east coast. To complicate matters more, the ten grandchildren were scattered throughout various school levels and systems, and involved in a host of extra-curricular activities. The eldest among us was in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Although we were missing several grandchildren, all the Wheless children were accounted for, in spite of the aches and pains they had suffered in the last five months.

Before Harvey Wheless passed away, there were a lot of hurt feelings caused by the very real shrapnel from an intense, proverbial explosion. (The explosion being the results of the election of the previous November, and the shrapnel, the words slung between family members based on whom they voted for.) Although some of the siblings had made hasty amends in the last few weeks, a few of the wounds were still raw. Factions had emerged, and you'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss the tension vibrating between the various family members. 

Even though some among us weren't on the nicest of terms, we tried our best to remember our purpose in coming together: to celebrate the long and fruitful life of Harvey Wheless, and to console one another, and especially his grieving widow, in the wake of our incalculable loss.

We all knew the person who would be hurting the worst would be my Grandma. After all, she had spent most of her life loving and taking care of Harvey, and she had been steadfast and loyal in her service. And throughout his own life, Harvey had taken care of her, in turn. As far as I ever noticed, they divided the labors of their house and home as they saw fit, and Grandma never wanted for anything. Though it had more than its fair share of hardship and difficulty, my grandparents' marriage stood for many of us as an example of devotion, selflessness, and sacrifice.

Any time I have asked Grandma how she'd made it through more than fifty years of marriage to Harvey, she has been happy to answer. Her lips curl into something just shy of a smile. "We had an agreement," she told me. "Whoever wanted to leave had to take the kids." Her delivery is brief and deliberate, without a hint of laughter. For years, I was certain she was joking. I come from the age of self-help gurus and life advisers; there had to be so much more to it than that. But the older I get, the more certain I am that she was serious; it was that simple.

My grandparents were from an era in which it was considered uncouth to talk about oneself.  Most of what I know about them comes from the stories told and retold by my parents, aunts and uncles. On occasion, and only if the tale was deemed especially relevant to the topic at hand, a piece of the patchwork oral history could be eked out of one of the grandparents.

Grandpa was the tougher egg to crack; he was quiet around the grandkids, but he would tell stories if he thought they were important. If and when Grandpa had something to tell you, you sat still as a statue, looked Grandpa in the eye, and listened with intention.

The last time my Grandpa told me something about his life was when I had started attending the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He had been in Williamsburg, he said, when he was training to go off and fight in World War II. He had been too young to serve for much of the war, but he finally got to Camp Peary just before the war ended. He had been utterly dismayed to miss out on the opportunity to serve his country at such a pivotal moment, so he made his way to Belgium to do his service after the war ended.

My Grandpa didn't tell me that story to talk about himself. While the story obviously contained the details of his own life, I believe it was a vehicle for something larger.  He wanted to describe to me why he felt service to the country was important, what it meant to him, and what he felt it should mean for the rest of the family.  

That my Grandpa had shared the story with me was incredibly special, because, as I've said, it was a rarity to hear Grandpa talk about himself. I kick myself now because I never wrote the story down. And in the eight years since I heard it, the details of Grandpa's time at Camp Peary have become blurry and begun to get lost.

The story of Camp Peary, like most of what I know about the lives of Harvey and Lorraine Wheless, has been pieced together roughly, and is probably full of holes and misunderstandings. So, dear family members, please forgive me any factual errors. I mean well.

On two separate occasions, I have asked my Grandma if she would let me interview her. I'd like to get a full oral history of the Wheless family from its matriarch, I explained. But each time I asked, she gently declined my offer. Her story, she said, would be of little interest to anyone. She didn't do anything worth noting. Those are the few statements Grandma made with which I cannot agree.

Lorraine Wheless lived through the Great Depression in her childhood home in Chicago. After World War II, she moved to Brussels to work for the Army as a civilian. In Brussels, she met my Grandpa, was married mere months later, and gave birth to my dad just shy of nine months after that. Next, the Wheless family moved back to America and Lorraine saw some of the country with her traveling salesman husband. After a time, their growing family settled down in Clearwater.  There, she raised a brood of five red-haired, rowdy, Catholic children (whom the nuns loved to discipline) in a speck of a house - four bedrooms and two bathrooms on a stamp-sized plot of land. A sometimes realtor and always mother and housewife, my grandma watched the world change as her children grew up. The first man walked on the moon across her television set. On that same set, she saw the world grow darker, too. Details of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the horrors of Vietnam must have unfolded before her eyes in grisly detail. Meanwhile, she and my Grandpa shaped their kids into brilliant, service-oriented adults. She watched her eldest son go off to the Naval Academy and become an F-14 RIO. Soon after that, her eldest daughter became one of the first women ever to attend West Point. The rest of the children went on to serve, too; the youngest son became an F-14 RIO like his older brother, the next daughter entered the Merchant Marine Academy and married a man in the Coast Guard, and the youngest daughter worked with the police department busting drug users at the Clearwater Beach (in a bikini, I should add. Dang, girl!)  The service ended up bringing its share of tragedy to the family: her eldest son, my dad, was paralyzed in an accident at the end of his first Mediterranean carrier cruise. Her eldest daughter's husband was in a tragic accident when the Humvee he was traveling in went into a roll in Bosnia. Though my uncle escaped, three of the men traveling with him did not share his luck. And the knocks didn't end there. Grandchildren came into the world. The marriages of her children were tested, and some dissolved. The first child from the next generation of Wheless relatives followed in her parents' paths and went to West Point. From there, she shipped out to serve in the Global War on Terror, a fact which still gives Grandma a good deal of anxiety.

I could, if I wanted to, have put that much more succinctly, Lorraine Wheless has had a full life, and she has seen a great many things, which makes her life interesting - to me, at least. But I understand what she means when she tells me, "no." After all, my grandmother would not be the same wonderful person she is if she liked to spend hours waxing poetic about herself. And we both know that is exactly what my interview would ask of her.

So now, instead of bothering her for a formal interview, I've decided to listen harder, and gather and re-tell all the stories I know.  And a lot of that listening started in earnest while I was staying at the Wheless homestead in Clearwater for Grandpa's funeral.

Staying at my grandparents' house was nothing new; it was common practice for my sister and I to bunk at "Haus Wheless" whenever we went on our annual visit to Florida. Though I was missing my sometimes-enemy, sometimes-partner-in-crime, I was in our usual room, at the very back corner of the house. The back corner room is one of three rooms in the back wing where my aunts and uncle and dad grew up. And like every room in that compact house, the back room was full of tales about the antics and misbehavior of the Wheless children.

The story I remember best about the back room involves my uncle, as do most good Wheless family stories. In this particular story, my uncle wasn't the perpetrator of the antics; he was - amazingly - the target. At some time during the night, he awoke in his bed as one of his friends forced open a window and sprayed the contents of a fire extinguisher throughout the room. An important thing to mention here is that, according to Wheless family lore, my Grandpa heard every nighttime noise: the rustling of Christmas wrapping paper; the patter of bare feet and centimeter-by-centimeter opening of a cookie jar; the stifled buzz of a radio hidden under a pillow, and even the deploying of a fire extinguisher in the room furthest away from his own. Awake and in an uproar, Grandpa came running through the house to the back room, where he found his son and everything else in his room coated in a film of white powder. He was irate, and immediately set out to handle the little bastard who'd wrecked up his house. The perpetrator was caught, and no one left the back room until everything was in better-than ship shape.

The siblings always told that story so well that I almost expected to open the door to the back room and find specks of white powder in hidden crevices. Of course, the room was always clean.

But when I opened the door to the back room on this trip, something was different. The room was full of the same eery gloom that hung over the rest of the house. Without Grandpa, the rooms and the stories were missing something major. And though the family was back together, Grandma was coming apart. As I said before, we expected she would take it hard. The person she'd spent the majority of her life with had passed on into another realm; the man who had been such an interconnected part of her existence was missing.

The next morning, Grandma worried over making me breakfast and coffee, then retreated to the TV room. From her usual seat, the high-backed recliner beside Grandpa's, she began to sift through a giant pile of cards. I took the seat beside her as she read each one. A surprising number of them contained two-by-three inserts of thick card stock that were foreign to me. When I asked what they were, my Grandma explained that the cards contained the details of a Catholic mass being given in dedication to the repose of my Grandpa's soul. I tried to hide my astonishment; what she described sounded an awful lot like the purchasing of indulgences. It was clear from the way she piled these little cards delicately and carefully on the table beside her that the mass dedications meant a great deal to my Grandma. She was concerned, she mentioned, about my Grandpa's soul making its way to heaven. The more masses that were dedicated to him, the more secure she seemed to feel. But they, and the simple and heartfelt letters of condolence, clearly affected her. Grandma was intent on keeping from crying, probably for the sake of me and my uncle (who was in and out of the room as he prepared for his morning run). Most of the time, she succeeded to ward off the tears, but I could see how hard that was for her. If she wanted to cry, that was okay, I wanted to tell her. But instead, I said nothing. What could I say? I could hardly fathom the pain she was going through; I was twenty-one and, if memory serves, juggling men insincerely.

In all the years I'd known her, I had never seen my Grandma cry. I'd watched her get angry plenty of times, most recently when I showed up after sophomore year of college with a tattoo on my wrist. But sadness was a foreign concept to me when it came to my Grandma, who was always good for a smile and a healthy dose of positive, "can-do" attitude. Whether she was finding things for the grandchildren to do, dancing to The Music Man soundtrack or doing an impromptu polka, going to church, or volunteering at the local hospital, there was never a frown on her face.

As far back as I could remember, I always thought my Grandma was happiest when she was bustling around in the kitchen. Her kitchen is a slender galley smack-dab in the center of the house, from which point she can get anywhere quickly and efficiently. I wonder whether that was a deciding factor in purchasing the house. She must have known she needed to be able to get to the front door (when men stopped by to inform her that her sons have been hiding in the bushes and lobbing oranges at their cars), the back wing (when her youngest son suddenly stopped rampaging loudly through the house because he had locked himself in the bathroom to draw a pair of glasses on his face with Sharpie on the first day of school), and the backyard (where the younger children could often be found wandering around the pool unsupervised) at a moment's notice. The kitchen is central to the house, I figured, because it is central to my Grandma's life.

Most of my memories involve my Grandma in the kitchen, where she is humming and singing as she creates an elaborate, hearty meal of fried chicken, salad, thin-sliced Florida tomatoes sprinkled with just the right amount of salt and pepper, homemade macaroni and cheese, and hush puppies fried in giant scoops of lard. And, best of all, no dinner at Grandma's was complete without a real dessert. She didn't serve the stingy Chips Ahoy cookies my sister and I got after dinner at home. Whenever we came to visit, there were gooey cherry tarts and rich chocolate cakes and sugary confections galore, and she plied us with them consistently - at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was no wonder we loved visiting Grandma and Grandpa so much, or that Grandpa ended up with diabetes later in his life. Sweetness was a facet of visiting our grandparents, and my sister and I loved it.

There was sweetness to my Grandpa, too. But anyone who met Harvey Wheless probably wouldn't describe him as sweet; he was a strong-headed and opinionated man, and he didn't mind telling you exactly how he felt about anything. When he was arguing about politics or religion or talking about World War II, my Grandpa's tone could resemble a kind of raspy barking. But around us grandkids, he was very different. On the condition we weren't acting up, he spoke softly and gently, with a generous heaping of the southern timbre of his youth. Around us, his voice was filled with love.

Whenever we came to visit, my grandparents would meet us in the driveway. Grandma would give my sister and me a hug and brightly remark on how much we had grown. Grandpa would wrap us in a big hug, too. "Hey, shugah," he'd say, a broad grin on his face. There was a thickness in the first syllable, and then the last half trailed off, all traces of the harsh "r" sound washed away. That was always his greeting, and it was heavy with sweetness.

As I sat beside Grandma and watched her read through all those cards, I could hear Grandpa saying the words as clear as day.  The mental track of Grandpa's greeting played and replayed, and it was as if he was sharing the room with us. I told Grandma about that memory, and both our eyes filled with glassy tears.

Later that day, and throughout the days that followed, the children and grandchildren filled the house. When they were there, Grandma obviously felt better. There were things to do, and a purpose to fill. Though we all brought food in so Grandma wouldn't have to cook for every one of us, she could still lose herself to small tasks: the orchestration of table setting, and the efficient cleanup of waste. 

The days passed very quickly. There were times for laughter, and times for tears. The laughter came mostly from storytelling.  Someone wondered aloud if there were any snake heads lying in the grass in the backyard. Knowing Grandpa, there were bound to be a handful. He hated snakes more than almost anything else in the world. The minute he saw one, he'd yell frantically for someone to grab his spade - the special spade reserved for snake-killing. Once he got the spade, he would slice its blade cleanly through the snake's neck, discard the body in the trash can, and leave the head to shrivel wherever its assuredly miserable life had ended.

There were plenty of other memories, too. The children remembered all the times Grandpa had given them terrible haircuts, or the way he'd positioned his kids around the dinner table strategically - so that the troublemakers were always within arm's reach. We remembered his love of puzzles and his gift for woodwork. Some of us remembered his uncompromising views on politics, but this particular memory wouldn't have a warm reception among all the siblings, so it was only discussed quietly, and by a select few.

Then there were the rough times that we'd all known were coming.  

The wake came first. Our family camped out all day at the funeral home as people came to visit Harvey, whose body lay in a casket at the front of the room. Each of the children went up to say goodbye to their father one last time. When they came back to the rest of the group, they remarked through tears about how good he looked, the amount of makeup on his face, and the angle of his glasses. Some of the grandchildren went up, too, but others of us held back. I could barely fathom seeing Grandpa laid low in a casket, dressed in fancy clothes. I wanted to remember Grandpa how I liked him best: just coming in from mowing the lawn, wearing his floppy hat, white t-shirt and light-blue jeans stained with grass and sweat.  I went up for just a moment, finally, but it was hard for me to see his face and know he would never again smile widely and say, "Hey shugah."

After the wake came the funeral. A large limousine arrived at the house early in the morning. It took my Grandma and some of the aunts and me on a gloomy trip to the church. Family and friends packed the aisles while Grandpa's casket remained at the entrance, surrounded by generations of Wheless men. On cue, they brought the casket to the front of the church and the reality hit. Yesterday, we could see Grandpa, but today, the lid of the casket was closed; the finality of things was inescapable.

Grandma had asked several people, myself among them, to deliver readings during the service. When the time came for me to read Psalm 23, I stumbled to the lectern and butchered the reading; by the fourth verse, I had burst irrevocably into sloppy, racking sobs, and I forgot to read the last verse outright. I wandered wetly back to my seat, and cried a long while into my sleeves and someone else's Kleenex. I wasn't alone; most of the eyes around me were red-rimmed and overflowing with tears. Over the readings and the interspersed hymns came the honking of noses being blown. Any of the sadness that had been held back for the last few days burst forth like a wellspring as we sat in the pews of the Wheless' Catholic church.

When the service ended, we drove out to a distant military cemetery for the burial. There was a delay in getting into the site, so we had to wait outside the graveyard. We all sat our procession of cars in frustration, burning gas as we kept our air conditioners blasting in the raging heat of the midday Florida sun. Finally, we got to the burial site, where a crisply-dressed group of uniformed men went through a well-choreographed routine of laying my grandfather to rest. The last thing I remember is the men taking the American flag from where it draped gloriously across the top of Grandpa's casket, and folding it smaller and smaller. When they were done, one of the uniformed men handed Grandma the compact triangle of blue and white fabric. She clutched it tightly.

The next thing I knew, we were driving again. Outside, it was oppressively hot and humid, but cool air circulated through the rental car like a dream. My dad and my uncle sat in the front of the car, thick as thieves as they told more stories about their father. I was alone in the back seat, glad for a break from all the stress and emotions of being shuffled between sad family events and dealing with the grown siblings' rivalries. It was calming to sit and listen to the familiar stories about Grandpa and the shenanigans the Wheless kids got themselves into.

"Tell the one about the spanking," I requested. Though there had been many spankings, there was no question of which story I was talking about.

It started as most young Wheless boy stories did: the boys had done something they oughtn't to have done, and it was a doozy. When they come home, Grandma uttered the oft-repeated words, "You just wait 'til your father comes home." The boys knew they were about to become intimately acquainted with "the belt," an implement no longer used to hold up pants because its width and suppleness made it more suited to tanning young hides. The boys schemed for a few moments (though I am sure those two schemed always, given the sheer volume of stories about their terrible childhood behavior) and came up with a plan: they would put on every pair of underwear they owned to soften the blow. By the time they'd emptied their dresser, the boys' butts were enormous, and, they expected, safe from harm. Soon, they heard Grandpa open the door, and Grandma told him what his boys had gotten into, "this time." Grandpa's stomping echoed through the house as he retrieved the belt, and stormed through the kitchen.  He picked up speed and velocity as he plowed through the TV room into the boys' room off the back hallway. There, the boys were hunkered down, awaiting the inevitable, and trying hard to keep from laughing. Grandpa took the first boy over his knee, flung the belt back, and slapped it across his rear end. Instead of the rewarding, "smack," he expected, the belt produced an unimpressive, and unexpected, "thud." He tried a few more times, but got the same result. The boy across his knee was stifling giggles, amazed that the plan had worked and getting a kick out of his dad's consternation. Grandpa was flummoxed, so he moved on to the next boy. There, he had the same puzzling outcome: the boy was laughing as he was being spanked.  Grandpa finally noticed that his sons' rear ends had expanded exponentially, and he figured out what they had done. Instead of getting angry, Grandpa laughed so hard that tears came to his eyes. The boys joined in, amazed that their plan had worked. The spanking was over, and the boys were unscathed. But the bubble-butt trick would only work once.

Whenever they tell this story, my dad and my uncle laugh so hard that they end up in tears. They look alike, the Wheless boys, and very much like my Grandpa. When I watched them cry and laugh at that story, I thought of Grandpa's reaction when he discovered the ingenuity of their evasive techniques. I'll bet he was proud.

Through the years, Grandpa tried hard to shape his boys into good men, and I am certain his spankings were necessary tools in that endeavor. But no matter what he did, one thing Harvey couldn't break his boys of was their fervor for rock and roll music. My dad used to listen to a portable radio under his pillow at night. If my Grandpa heard it, he would yell and scream about the garbage that "kids [of the 1970s]" listened to. He even broke the radio on at least one occasion, slamming it into the hard tile without remorse. But no matter what my Grandpa tried to do to change his sons' musical tastes, his boys were fanatical about rock and roll.

Throughout their lives, the Wheless boys have maintained similar tastes in music. Maybe it was from sneaking tracks to one another in their youth, or maybe it was a result of their similar upbringings. Regardless, being stuck a car with them and an XM radio, I would normally have been subjected to whatever loud and obnoxious music the Wheless boys preferred. Due to the solemnity of the occasion, I was spared from the cacophony that is Brother Ted Nugent's "music." Instead, the men had settled on the Grateful Dead station, of which I'm sure Grandpa still would not have approved, despite its being more akin to blues than rock and roll.

That was when something amazing happened. After the story was told, there was a lull in the conversation, and the opening notes of "Bird Song" began to play.

I must have heard Bird Song a hundred times before that moment. Summer afternoons weren't complete without Jerry Garcia's music playing through the outdoor speakers as my dad grilled or floated in the pool, and this particular song was one that stuck with me. As a woman who thought she had something to say, I was particularly drawn in by the line, "Something like a bird within her sang." When I'd gotten homesick at college, "Bird Song" was one of a handful of Grateful Dead songs I'd downloaded and played on repeat on my laptop or my iPod.

But then, after having spent a handful of days steeping myself in tales and events surrounding the life and death of a great man, the song took on a different meaning - and not just for me. The car stayed silent. We all listened as the once familiar lyrics transformed into a kind of joyous hymn, so different from the elegies that had filled our last few days. It was one of those times when the universe reminds you of just how beautiful life is, and how its true purpose, though fleeting, is to spread sweetness around. I felt as if my Grandpa had sent that song (an ironic choice, for certain) to remind us of how he would always live on in his children, and in his children's children, and so on, and so forth.  "Don't you cry anymore," the song reminded us, "Anyone who sings a tune so sweet is passing by."

When I remember Grandpa, I remember, "Hey shugah," and the sweetness, and especially the devotion of and to my Grandma. They are the warm red and blue plaid flannel pieces that make up the great scrap quilt of family memories I'm laboring over. I want to make sure that, though Grandpa is gone, his memory will always live on in the family of unique (or, crazy, depending on which family members you ask) and amazing people he and his wife created.