The Funerals Went on Forever

PFC Bruce E. Bowers was born on January 20, 1945 and died on April, 17, 1967. It took seven days for my brother's body to arrive home from Vietnam. It was a long week. As he was the first boy to be killed in our little town of Dearborn Heights, it was big local news. A reporter came from the Dearborn Press and Guide and borrowed his military photograph to reprint with the article. Mother was still lying on the sofa as though she were faint and I suppose she really was. He sat in a kitchen chair next to her and they spoke. I have no recollection of seeing the article or what it might have said. I'm sure I did, but some details have been lost in a bad memory.

I chose to go back to school while we waited for the Army to return his remains. It was awkward for everybody, my teachers, my classmates, the kids on the bus. However, I simply couldn't stand sitting around the living room with mother as though somehow things might be o.k. again once we saw his body and verified that his death was real. Nothing would ever be o.k. again as far as Vietnam was concerned. Nothing would be o.k. again as far as Bruce's death was concerned. 

Then. That fateful day when his casket arrived at the Voran Funeral Home on Ford Road in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Oh. My. God.

It was a Sunday and so we had all gone to church. We always went to church. Always. Three times per week on the average and more if the doors were open. Dearborn Valley Church of Christ. Ugh. Anyway, that's another story for another time. Somehow everyone in church and in the city had arrived at the funeral home before we had. If they were looking for a tragic bit of drama they had come to the right place. It was horrific. So much for family privacy back then or even now. There was a HUGE audience for what would come to be embedded in my memory forever more.

There were so many people there that they had to open at least one and maybe two viewing rooms to hold them all. I think the local florists made a whole lot of money that week as there had to have been over 200 pots and sprays of flowers. The fragrance nearly floored me with nausea. Fifty years later and my stomach still lurches at the smell of fresh cut flowers. The morticians abroad had encased his body in glass within the casket to avoid a more rapid deterioration and the smell that would have come from that given the length of time he had been dead. 

We came in as a "family" and made our way to the front of the mass of people and approached the casket. In her legal blindness, our mother began to feel the silky lining and attempted to find his body with her hands. She discovered the glass and began yelling "I can't see him!!! I can't touch him!!! It's too dark!!! I CAN'T SEE HIM!!! Why is this glass here??!" She tried to reach beneath the leg area of the box hoping to touch his leg. Glass. Completely encased in glass. The funeral directors scrambled to fetch a couple of pole lamps to light the area better, thinking this might help. It did not. She could not see her baby; nor could she touch him. She collapsed onto the casket and begin a loud, pitiful, Irish wailing. The people got what they had come for. As they all sat in rows upon rows of chairs, her tragic pain, which was deeper than her very soul, was on full display. It was nearly unbearable for all to witness, but not more so than for myself and my young brother, Gary.

We were standing behind our mother who had all but lost total control of her grief. We held hands and were scared. Someone gave the signal for our first cousins to come forward and stand with us. It was an internal signal on their part and I am still grateful. I was close to my cousin Audrey at the time; the daughter of my dad's sister, Mildred. She came and took me in her arms and I wept. Great heavy sobs of weeping for the pain my mother was in. Our oldest brother, Clyde, flew home from Milwaukee to be there and our first cousin, Johnny, came to stand with Gary. He was the son of my mother's brother, Howard. Johnny's mother was the aunt who lived down the street and deplored us. Anyway, my memory is getting messy here. I can't seem to help it, so I'll just keep typing. Our first cousin, Susie, the daughter of my dad's sister, Mae, was there and my first cousin Shirley, the daughter of my dad's sister, Ora.

 

The cousins decided to get us out of Dodge. Thank God. Audrey, Shirley, and Susie took me out to the car and we drove to McDonald's where the very thought of food made me want to throw-up. I have no idea where my brother and Johnny took Gary. I suspect he was a bigger handful than I as he was closely bonded to Bruce and this was just too much for him. Luckily our oldest brother was a clinical psychologist and I suppose he knew the best way to deal with shock and unfathomable grief. My Uncle Howard, Johnny's father and mother's only brother stayed with Mom and somehow the day eventually ended and mother went quietly to bed. I wouldn't be surprised if someone arranged for a sedative which she would have never take under any other circumstances. Sadly, this was only the beginning of another week of hell on earth. A Rosary, a Catholic Mass and a Protestant Funeral to come.

Then there was Vietnam

The next several years our country would be shocked and saddened to watch on television the assassinations of President JFK; Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I was a bit too young to understand beyond the horror that I saw in my mom's face as she sat on the floor in front of the t.v. It was the first time that I considered the world outside of our home to be unsafe, but wouldn't be the last by a long shot.

My brother, Bruce was nine years older than I. He was not very nice to me. In fact, he was seriously pretty abusive to me. I can't go there. No. I just can't and won't. However, he didn't really deserve to be killed in Vietnam, but he was. The war was heating up in 1965 and '66. He had thus been able to maintain a deferment as the sole support of our family. He went to college for a semester and realized it wasn't his forte. He sensed he would probably be drafted soon with his revised status as A-1; so he went out one day to various recruiting offices to try and discover which branch might be best for him. His draft notice from the Army was in the mailbox when he returned. 

Off to Basic Training he went. He proposed to Barbara just before he left and gave her a diamond engagement ring. As he cleaned out his car trunk he gave me his John Lennon sun-glasses and his mood ring, then told me to get lost. 

He came home on leave for Christmas with marching papers to Vietnam. One Sunday morning he sat down in Mom's swivel-rocker to shine his boots. Mom was standing in the kitchen a few feet away. He said to her: "Well, Mom...in about a year you should be a rich lady." She knew he was talking about death benefits and she scolded him. He said if it wasn't for Barbara he wouldn't mind going to fight for our country. He soon shipped out to An Khe, Vietnam, part of the central highlands region, as an Army ground troop. 

The story is that after the first week or so he twisted his ankle. He had always had trouble with his ankles. He was put-on KP duty for six weeks so it could heal. They sent him back out into the field Monday night and he was killed Monday night, April 17th, 1967. Apparently he was helping a buddy cross a body of water. He'd always been a good swimmer. Our oldest brother, Clyde, made sure he learned at the YMCA as a boy. His buddies gun went off and shot him. We never knew where the bullet entry was. My Uncle Howard, Mom's brother, had to scold the soldiers who accompanied his body home as they had conflicting stories. He told them to decide on one to tell his mother. This was it.

To say this was a horrible time in my family's life is a major understatement. It began early one morning when the doorbell rang and a soldier dressed in a brown military uniform stood there trying to tell my mother that her son had been killed in Vietnam. She screamed at him to GO AWAY as she didn't believe it was true. She asked me to look at him and tell her what he looked like. I described the uniform. He asked her if there was someone else he might talk to. Mom told me to run down the street and get my Aunt Garnetta. I ran like the wind and caught my Aunt in her kitchen. I was breathless as I told her something had happened to Bruce, a man was at the house and mom wanted her to come right away and she did. Life stopped as my Aunt began making phone calls to relatives and friends while my mother just collapsed on the sofa and wailed.

Eventually, that evening, I was allowed to walk down the street to my best friends house. Signe answered the door and I told her Bruce was dead. She had no idea what to say so went into her dad's room where he was napping. He called me in and I told him. He took me in his arms and held me as I cried and cried and cried. I didn't see Signe again for months. I guess she was deemed too young to be exposed to such life tragedy. Too young indeed. I was 12. Bruce was 22. Our youngest brother, Gary, was 11 and he took it so hard that he would never recover from the loss.

Touched by Desegregation

My mother was the ultimate pragmatist. In 1963 she bought a small house in a good neighborhood in Dearborn Heights, MI. We moved-in right down the street from her younger brother and his family who had lived down the street from us in Detroit as well. I would later learn the depth of my Aunt's disdain for us. She saw my mother and us as a burden that she wanted no part of. But, I digress.

I started elementary school and felt out-of-place from the start. The other kids had socks that matched their outfits and fancy shoes. We were poor. I had little. Lucky for me our country was on the brink of a social revolution and soon enough my blue jeans, tee-shirts and flip-flops were the style. 

Apparently I showed an early talent for speaking in front of a crowd. From about 3rd grade on I was the designated announcer at our elementary school plays and concerts. I wanted to sing, but they said they needed me to announce. It was mostly because my mother was blind and they figured she would be able to hear my voice if it were solo. She didn't much care though. Getting her to attend a concert was difficult at best. I think she had a great social anxiety and perhaps it was connected to her blindness. I don't know.

In fourth grade we were "bused" to another elementary school within the district. It had something to do with the Roe vs. Wade issue; Racism and The Civil Rights Movement. It confused me a lot because there were ONLY white people in the new city that we had moved to. What did our being bused down the street have to do with desegregation? I suppose the district needed to be in compliance and so we went.

The next year we were back at our home campus where it was close enough to walk. I only have glimpses of memory from 5th and 6th grade. I had an intense desire to learn to play an instrument. Mom said we couldn't afford it. Another great desire of mine was to be in the Girl Scouts which was also met with mother's denial due to finances. She raised us on about $400. per month from my father's social security check. She could have gotten government assistance, but she refused saying it was "for people who really needed it." She had an Appalachian dignity and pride that would not allow her to confess that we could have easily and legally had a little bit more in life. She was true to her convictions and stubborn as heck. We went without.

I Blame It On Jimmy Hoffa

My father died when I was five years old. It was March 9, 1960. I was right there. He had a heart attack while sitting on the toilet. I watched my mother carry him out of the bathroom on a blast of adrenaline. She laid him on the sofa while she went to call an ambulance. She was blind and could not see that I was standing next to my daddy's head patting his cheeks and trying to get him to wake-up. He didn't wake-up. I smelled poop and yelled to mom that daddy had just soiled himself. It's what the body does when it dies. Mom shooed me away and the men in white coats came to put him on a wooden stretcher and carry him out the door for the last time. I blame Jimmy Hoffa.

We lived in a small Victorian house on Perry Street in Detroit, Michigan. The house might have been called a "Painted Lady" had my parents selected different colors to paint it other than white and green. The Teamster's Union was about 600 feet away from our house at the end of the road and across Trumble Ave. Somehow my dad had started going over there to sit around with "the boys" and chew the fat. Soon after Jimmy started parking his car in front of our house asking that we keep an eye on it. He later started parking it in our backyard for closer security. 

My mom and dad and oldest brother were born in Montgomery County, Tennessee. They moved to Detroit in 1942 so dad could work in the Automobile Industry. He eventually bought a gas station across the street from Briggs (Tiger) Baseball Stadium. My younger brother, in diapers, and I helped our dad "flag-down" fans to park in his station for a few pennies during baseball games.

The night he died, he and mom were headed-up to the gas station because there was something wrong with the books. My dad could not read, write or do arithmetic. My mom kept the books. Dad had been doing auto repair and such for Jimmy Hoffa and his "buddies" and somehow things started to get messed-up. Dad was very stressed-out. On the way to the station he began to feel poorly and they came back home. Then he died.

I'll always remember the day, years later, when Jimmy Hoffa went missing. My mom watched the newscast and when it was over she turned around and said: "You know, I never did like that man." Apparently others did not either.

We continued to live on Perry Street until 1963 when mom received what my brother called "The Mafia Payoff." Hoffa managed to buy her house for three times what it was worth so the Teamster's Union could build a parking lot there and they did. We moved to the suburbs in the blossoming time of "White Flight." The Civil Rights Movement was in full-swing by then.

The Christmas before we moved out of Detroit my older brother, Clyde, bought me a BLACK Chatty-Cathy doll. My mother's reaction was to ask: "Clyde, what do you mean?!" He bought that doll for me because he knew that I would love it, cherish it and care for it in a tender way, regardless of the color of her skin, and I did. She disappeared when we moved to the suburbs, but nearly 50 years later my first grandchild would be half black and half white. Oh, don't get me started on how much I love, cherish and care for that child! I also cherished my older brother, Clyde, who throughout the years managed to interject opportunities like this for me to grow beyond my upbringing. He was my hero, my father-figure, my big brother.