History

It is few months before my mother’s diagnosis, and she and my father are watching a Band of Brothers marathon on one of the cable channels. My father has seen the miniseries many times and is sleeping through most of it. The oddity of this particular scene is my mother, who is sitting next to him on the couch, her eyes glued to the television. She has always avoided war movies or any other programming with blood and violence. As she watches now, though, she asks questions about the characters and their missions, as well as names of the planes and guns. Much of this is information she had known just a few years earlier.

Her father was in the Air Force during and after World War II. He died of cancer when my mother was nine years old, but she grew up with the stories of his experiences.

The scene of my parents and the miniseries is unnerving. My parents’ interests in the show are reversed from their normal behavior, but more problematic is my mother’s behavior: she seems to be using the program to compensate for memories of her father’s experiences that she can no longer remember. Her father was not in France in 1944, as he was stationed mostly in India and Italy, but just seeing what he might have gone through, or known people who had, seems to be enough to fill gaps forming in my mother’s mind as she takes in episode after episode.