Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Europe by allied forces during World War II. Normally, I would write about my father, a combat engineer who landed on Omaha Beach that morning with the first wave of troops. But today my thoughts are on his wife, my mother, back in Missouri that day. What, I wonder must she have thought when she heard the news alert that American troops had landed in France?

She would have known he was in England preparing for something big and that he was somehow involved in this massive invasion force. During the war she shared a small apartment with one of dad’s sisters. She had a small son, my older brother. She would have heard the news from the radio or when she picked up the evening paper.

Was she a widow, she may have wondered? Was he alive, wounded or lost? Now would begin the many weeks of anxiously looking out the window at any car that stopped on the front curb. That is how war families were informed of the death of their sons. She would wait and wonder and being the religious woman she was she would have prayed.

Today families with children in war zones still anxiously wait hoping against hope they never receive the visit from armed forces personnel that bears bad news. Prayer chains are created among these families. They beseech God to bring them home unharmed and as they were when they left for conflict. But even if they return home alive war has had its impact and ripped the innocence that was once a part of their live.

My father returned from World War II. But he was forever changed by what he had experienced. My mother once told me he was not the same man she had married. War changed my dad and had a negative impact on his relationship with my mother. In those years men who came home from combat were alone with their minds and memories and had to deal with it as best they could. A lot can be said about “the greatest generation” and what made them great. But I will say from first hand experience that many men like my father made a new life that covered over the emotional and mental scars from their combat experience. They got on with life, flawed as it may have been, and raised families and built the schools and businesses in the towns and cities of our time.

The attached picture of my mother in her youth tells quite another story on this day. It is a woman dressed in a cotton dress with a bonnet looking away from the camera into the distance. What does she see? What is she thinking? Knowing the kind of woman my mother was I think she was looking for a world to come when war is a long vanished memory. I think she was looking for the city whose builder and maker is God.