Pearl Harbor

"I want to go to Pearl Harbor," said Mom, on New Years Day 2015.

And so we went, just a few short months later. We flew to Hawaii, wrangled the rental car up the coast, and arrived before the gates opened.

We spent all day visiting the memorials, the museums, reading, watching, looking at the pictures. We took the ferry out to the memorial for the USS Arizona. We filed off the boat and walked through the doorway. We looked out at the water, oil still visible on the surface 74 years later. We stood quietly among the crowd of hundreds, the click of cameras, the whisper of thoughts the only sounds. It was a beautiful sunny, Hawaiian day. Just as it probably was the day of the attack.

Before we left on our trip, we invited our neighbors, Bill and Betty, over to talk about Hawaii. They were both born and raised there before moving to Los Angeles some fifty years ago. Bill told stories of working in the fields after school, sometimes instead of school. Betty told of sitting on the porch that morning and hearing the attack. Of being forced from her family's home to make way for military housing afterward. There wasn't much emotion to their memories, simply facts, Polaroids from a life lived back then. But we talked later about how it was impossible to imagine what it would have been like to have been on the island that day, that week, that year. To live through it and comprehend it and process it.

We filed back off the memorial slowly that Monday, photographers like me trying to get a few last shots of the gorgeous panorama around us. We sat on the ferry, quietly heading back, thinking about the gravity of where we had just been, what we had just experienced. And then when we got back inside the visitors' center, Mom, Angela and I headed into the restroom. It was there where we finally let go. I remember coming out of the stall to wash my hands and seeing my Mom in tears.

This was the reason for the trip. The trip she'd waited her whole life to take. The trip we'd spent the last few months not sure would happen (see: Sarah gets blood clots). To be in this space, at the memorial, to take it all in, to think about the event, the attack, the people, her father who served in the Navy, her friend who'd worked with the veterans, everyone who'd come before us.

Growing up Pearl Harbor Day was marked on the calendar like most other holidays. We spoke of it, we read about it. And now here we were, in the place where it happened. We cried in that moment, all three of us. In the bathroom in the visitors' center. We cried for the enormity of it all. For the people we'd lost, not as a direct result of the attack but for the memories we carried with us. For my grandfather, the Navy man, for Helen, the helper. We all cried.

And then we got back in the rental car, fought traffic all the way back down the coast and found our way to the hotel bar. We sat on the patio, ordered drinks, and toasted Charlie and Helen. My grandfather and our very dear family friend. We toasted them and what this trip meant. What history means. What love means. What perseverance means. What remembering means. And then we watched the sun set. To be in that place, to experience it, we are thankful, and grateful, and most of all, full of hope at what has transpired since, that from something like that day can come something that is, in the end, beautiful.

God bless those we lost. God bless those who gave so much for so long. God bless America.