The folded flag was presented that gray day with stiff formality,
symbol of service, of sacrifice, of a career spent beneath the waves—
and followed by the rifle volley,
a sharp, echoing salute to a silent warrior of the deep.
But it was the faces, the bewildered faces,
that etched themselves indelibly into my memory.
My cousins, all three of similar age to myself,
bearing the fullness of childhood innocence,
their eyes wide with confusion,
their mouths drawn tight.
And their mother, my aunt, a stoic matriarch,
her face a mask of controlled grief,
her hands trembling slightly as she accepted the flag,
the final vestige of her husband’s life.
I saw in their faces a dawning awareness,
a slow, agonizing realization of the finality of death,
the irreversible absence,
the gaping hole in their family fabric.
It wasn’t just the loss of a husband, of a father, of an uncle;
it was the loss of a future, of shared memories,
of yet spoken words, of enduring connection—
a hard lesson learned, not in some book or sermon,
but in the silent language of searching faces,
at a military burial for a noble submariner,
lost to the depths of eternity.
© 2024, Kenneth Koziol. All rights reserved. (1964)
