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For Betty Thornhill Iles AND every man and woman who sacrificed their lives in the Allied cause.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events.

To some generations much is given.

Of other generations much is expected.

This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

1

It’s odd how death often marks a beginning rather than an end. We know someone for ten years, twenty years, longer. We see them in the course of daily life. We speak, laugh, exchange harsh words; we think we have some notion of who they are.

And then they die.

In death, the fluid impressions formed over a lifetime begin to assume definite shape. The picture comes into focus. New facts emerge. Safes are opened, wills read. With finality, and with distance, we often discover that the people we thought we knew were actually quite different than we imagined. And the closer we were to them, the more shocking this surprise is.

So it was with my grandfather. He died violently, and quite publicly, in circumstances so extraordinary that they got thirty seconds of airtime on the national evening news. It happened last Tuesday, in a MedStar helicopter ambulance en route from Fairplay, Georgia — the small town in which I was born and raised — to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where I work as an emergency physician. While making his rounds at Fairplay’s local hospital, my grandfather collapsed at a nurses’ station. Fighting to ignore the terrible pain in his lower back, he had a nurse take his blood pressure. When he heard the figures, he correctly diagnosed a leaking abdominal aortic aneurysm and realized that without immediate emergency surgery he would die.

With two nurses supporting him, he spoke on a telephone just long enough to summon the MedStar from Atlanta, forty miles away. My grandmother insisted on remaining by his side in the chopper, and the pilot reluctantly agreed. They don’t usually allow that, but damn near everybody in the Georgia medical community knew or knew of my grandfather — a quiet but eminently respected lung specialist. Besides, my grandmother wasn’t the kind of woman that men talked back to. Ever.

The MedStar crashed twenty minutes later on a quiet street in the suburbs of Atlanta. That was four days ago, and as yet no one has determined the cause of the crash. Just one of those freak things, I guess. Pilot error, they like to call it. I don’t really care whose fault it was. I’m not looking to sue. We’re not — or weren’t — that kind of family.

My grandparents’ deaths hit me especially hard, because they raised me from the age of five. My parents died in a car crash in 1970. I’ve seen more than my share of tragedy, I suppose. I still do. It sweeps through my emergency room every day and night, trailing blood and cocaine and whiskey-breath and burnt skin and dead kids. Such is life. The reason I’m writing this down is because of what happened at the burial — or rather, who I met at the burial. Because it was there, in a place of death, that my grandfather’s secret life revealed itself at last.