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.
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