During World War II my grandmother had three brothers serve: Tom, Robie and Jack. My grandfather enlisted in 1943 and served in the Pacific as well. All of them came home but it was an incredibly difficult time for my grandmother and her family. Everyone worried, she told me, everyone worried about everything. The irony for my family is that it was not the soldiers who went overseas who were grievously injured; it was the one who never left.

The way she told the story, my great uncle Jack enlisted in the army and was sent to Kentucky for training before being shipped to Europe. He and two friends were assigned to go out into a practice inactive mine field. As they marched across it, the mines exploded around them. Jack found himself trapped in the middle, covered in pieces of his friends. The field was active and no one had told them or the officer who sent them into it. It was a colossal horrific accident. The explosions left him completely deaf in one ear and nearly so in the other. But even worse, when they got him out he was methodically gathering the pieces of his buddies and placing them in piles.

Jack was granted a Section 8 discharge for psychiatric reasons. He was on disability for the rest of his life. But more importantly, he was never the same again.

My grandmother said he was always quirky before the war - a different (dry) sense of humor, etc. But afterward he was simply "not right". He was not okay. He worked in a variety of jobs and businesses and found some semblance of middle class economic success. He was married four times - twice to the same woman and they had one child. His son, John Jr., was killed in a car accident as a young man. He had also been married twice by then and had three children. In the last years of his life great Uncle Jack lived in FL, very near my grandmother and used it as his base to visit his grandchildren. He died in 1984 and is buried near my great grandmother and grandparents.

But that is not all of his story.

None of his grandchildren attended the funeral. The youngest two were very small and the oldest (from his son's first marriage) lived some distance away. It was, to me anyway, as if he left no one behind. His surviving brothers and sisters were there for him in the end and so were my mother and brother and I who knew him as a sweet old man but it was very surreal - it was almost like he should have died on the minefield that day and it had just taken a those extra years for him to go. I know its rather melodramatic to write that but of the eight siblings he is the one they all had least contact with and the one who is the only dead end. We simply do not know what became of his grandchildren; we do not even know their names.

A couple of years after his death Uncle Jack's eldest granddaughter called my grandmother. We have no idea how she found the phone number but she was nearby visiting friends and wanted to talk about her father and grandfather. They were on the phone for some length and she promised to phone back in the next day and come visit. We never heard from her again and that was more than 20 years ago.

This is how families disappear. An accident or two, phone numbers and addresses never recorded, names forgotten. Somewhere out there are three children who know nothing about their father's family or what happened to their grandfather in Kentucky or that the Lennons came from Ireland. They might not even know what my Uncle Jack looked like when he was young. But here he is, just in case they ever go searching for John Lennon, of the Bronx, NY.

I keep waiting for someone to find me on the internet and ask if I was related to Jack Lennon. I think they will be surprised by what I have to tell them.

[Post pic of Jack and nephew Mike, 1943 in the Bronx. Jack was 22 years old; second pic of Jack circa 1932; third pic has Jack back row, standing on right. (That's my grandmother standing in back middle) dated 1935.]