"It was worse"

Pearl Harbor, 72 years ago. Almost a lifetime.

My dad was at work that Sunday.  A former neighbor, Brooks Webster, was there - recently out of Bowdoin College.  My mom was teaching in Ludington, Michiga at the high school and my mother in law was bundled up in a house off the Hudson River north of the city.  Like the day Kennedy was shot or 9-11 for others, the precise moment and location - down to what you were doing and who said what - is carved in granite on the precursor to the Facebook "wall".

I asked Brooks about it once; you know. How was it?. Aside from a rather cold and sorrowful look his only comment was "it was worse".  Never the "than what"...just worse.

My dad went into the service a short while thereafter making it across the South Pacific with two wounds and eventually to Japan for the first of the occupation. Mom taught and did factory work as did my mother in law.  Somehow I think it was worse for them - not in the life threatening sense like being in combat or for that matter with the risk of being shot or shot at, but waiting. Waiting for news.

My point is that announcements like Pearl Harbor or 9-11 come out of the blue.  There is an interruption and the news is dumped out. Momentous news that for a second freezes all your senses and observations, reducing them to dimensional picture that you just carry around in your "wall of life".