"It was worse"

My dad was at work that Sunday.  A former neighbor, Brooks Webster, was there - recently out of Bowdoin College and assigned to Pearl - his first trip west of the Mississippi.  My mom was teaching latin, english and french in Ludington, Michigan 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. 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 the knock on the door telling them the worse. .

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".