My Grampa Arthur died in early 1953 while we were in Normandy. I remember my mother crying in her room. It made me sad too. I used to sit on his lap and comb his hair for him.
My mother and I lived with her parents when my dad got out of Texas A&M and went to Abadan in Persia (now Iran), so I spent my youngest years there. She said it was so sad that he never got to meet my sister Lydia.
Back then, it wasn’t so easy to travel from Europe to the United States. For my mother to have flown back to Boston would have been incredibly expensive, and it just wasn’t possible. They were very close, so it must have been very hard for her to be so far away.