What He Believed

Memorial Day, my father, and a country two hundred and fifty years into making itself true

My mother had a stroke on Christmas Day. It was my dad’s birthday. I drove with my brother and nephew from Washington to Nebraska with a small fridge of yogurt in the back of the car.

When we got there, my mother was in hospice. The hospital had sent her there straight from the stroke because nobody expected her to survive, and they had stopped giving her food and water. My brother and I saw that every time someone moistened her lips, she reacted. She wanted water. We argued to the rest of the family that she should get to decide whether to live, rather than die of dehydration. We gave her water through a straw. She drank. She lived for several more months. She regained her speech, and the first words she said were to tell my dad that she loved him.

My father, beside her bed through all of it, ate marionberry yogurt from the fridge in the car and told me it tasted like home. Home was Coram, Montana, where he had grown up extremely poor in a town with copper mines that had polluted the groundwater. He drank that water as a kid. He left Coram at eighteen by enlisting in the United States Air Force.

His name was Ralph Gibbons. He retired as a major, but he started as an airman, which is the lowest enlisted rank, and put himself through college and then a master’s at the University of Nebraska Omaha while moving around the world for the Air Force, mostly by correspondence in the years before that was easy. He had wanted to be a pilot, but his eyesight didn’t cooperate, so instead he spent most of his Air Force career staring at a radar screen in remote outposts, watching for what the Soviets might send our way.

He never stopped loving the sky. He taught me to identify the planes flying overhead by their silhouettes; he taught me about airfoils and air flow and model rockets and space. He knew by heart the poem that begins Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. When the Challenger exploded he grieved with me about it as a teacher, and as a man who had once wanted to fly. He wanted me to go to the Air Force Academy. He was secretly disappointed when I chose Harvard instead, though he tried to hide it.

He met my mother on a blind date in Omaha, and married her after a handful more, because he was being transferred and they didn’t want to be apart. They were married and devoted to each other for more than sixty years. He was tall and sturdy, with hands that looked enormous to me even after I was a grown woman, like he was a giant pretending to be a human. He smelled like Irish Spring soap. He was calm, slow to anger, patient with everyone in his life. Every week, until the day he died, he called the members of our extended family — his five children, his five siblings, his nieces and nephews, his grandchildren — to ask how they were.

He believed everyone was equal. “You’re no better than them, and they’re no better than you,” was how he put it. He said it to me when I was a child and he said it to me when I was a grown woman, and he meant it every time. He had grown up in a town the country had failed. He believed in the country anyway, because giving up on it meant giving up on the idea that all of us, every one of us, are created equal.

He believed in the Constitution fervently. He believed everyone had the right to speak, even when they were saying things he thought were wrong. I may not agree with what you have to say, he liked to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. He was a Republican for most of his life, because of the way the anti-war left had treated returning Vietnam veterans. He had enlisted out of patriotism. He saw his work as protecting people. He could not forgive the people who called the men who came home baby killers.

I am a Democrat. He never once questioned my patriotism, or treated my politics as a betrayal. He understood that he and I both believed deeply in the promise of the country, even when we thought about it differently. He did not believe Republicans and Democrats were enemies. He believed we were citizens of the same country, working — sometimes from different perspectives — on the same long unfinished project.

That project was sketched two hundred and fifty years ago. The Declaration of Independence was signed in July of 1776, and the Constitution was ratified eleven years later, and together they laid out a country an unlikely group of men had not yet figured out how to build. They knew that. They left the work for later generations. The work is never finished. It is also never abandoned, because people like my father keep showing up to do it.

I am writing about him this Memorial Day because I think the country needs to remember those things he believed: that everyone is created equal; that among our fundamental rights is freedom of speech, even for people we don’t agree with, and freedom of religion, even for people who don’t believe the same things we do. He understood that political disagreement can be constructive, rather than destructive, and that disagreement was not enmity. He believed the country was a project worth giving his life to, even though the country had failed him before he was old enough to vote.

We are in a moment when the people running the country appear to have forgotten all of this. They believe some people are not equal. They believe speech they disagree with is criminal. They believe political opponents are enemies. They believe the country is something to take from, rather than something to serve.

My father would have been heartbroken. He would also have kept showing up. He would have called everyone in the family every week. He would have mentored cadets. He would have voted in every election and treated his Democratic daughter as a fellow citizen and not a foe. He would have done the long unfinished work.

He needed minor surgery in the spring after my mother’s stroke. He went into the hospital for it. He caught influenza there from someone who wasn’t wearing a mask. He died.

We buried him at the national cemetery in Nebraska in his Civil Air Patrol uniform, which he had worn as a volunteer for more years than he had worn his Air Force uniform on active duty. He had started showing up to CAP meetings with me when I was thirteen and announced I wanted to be an astronaut. He kept showing up after I left for college. He mentored cadets for the rest of his life.

My mother went a few months later. A chaplain visited her at the nursing home. The chaplain had COVID and was not wearing a mask, because in Nebraska masking had become a left-wing conspiracy theory. She started to have trouble breathing, and she had another stroke, and she died.

Both of my parents were killed by viruses they caught from unmasked visitors. I am angry about this, and I am going to be angry for the rest of my life. Not just at the visitors, but at the kind of thinking that would rather kill vulnerable people than take a sensible precaution because there is a political point to be made. My father did not think like that. He thought political disagreement could be honorable. He did not think it was worth killing anyone over.

She is buried with him at the national cemetery, in a matching casket. I helped find caskets for them that were made in the United States, because that would have mattered to him.

Memorial Day is for people like my father. It is for the ones who believed in the country with a particular kind of devotion — not the country’s perfection, but its founding promise. Poor kids from polluted Montana towns who enlisted in spite of what the country had done to them. Teachers who taught fifth and sixth graders to read after the kids had given up on themselves. Volunteers who showed up to the meetings nobody else came to. Republicans who never doubted that Democrats loved the country, and Democrats who never doubted that Republicans loved it back. People who held the line on the country’s founding idea in the small rooms of their own lives, generation after generation, even when the country itself was failing them.

You don’t have to be certain the work will succeed. You only have to keep showing up.

I am going to drive past the Family Pancake House in Redmond today, where my parents used to eat breakfast with me on their visits to Washington. I am going to think about my father: about the boy in Coram who drank polluted water and grew up believing in the country anyway; about the airman who put himself through college; about the man who knew by heart the poem about slipping the surly bonds of earth; about the Republican who never questioned his Democratic daughter’s patriotism; about the man beside my mother’s bed in hospice eating marionberry yogurt that tasted like home.

On this Memorial Day, let us remember together the promise of the American experiment and the people who have given their lives towards making it real.