Memorial Day, 2026

A small and somewhat dilapidated Jewish Cemetery in the City of Commerce just southeast of LA might seem like an unlikely place to meet your father for the very first time. But so it was when my wife sat across from hers in early April this year.

His name was Paul, a gunner on an ill-fated B26 shot down over Germany in early 1945. She was little more than two years old on the day he died. No one bothered to tell her mother when Paul’s remains were repatriated and put to rest in Commerce, so Barbara grew up and lived her life in the reconciled but mistaken belief that her father was missing in action. She was informed otherwise late last year, entirely by chance, when a veteran’s organization called her cousin to ask if there were any Broffmans in the family. Yes, her cousin replied. She told them about Barbara, and that’s when they told her cousin about Paul’s repatriation and internment seven decades earlier at Mount Carmel Cemetery in the City of Commerce.

Cemetery notwithstanding, I didn’t know how Barbara would react to meeting her father for the very first time, so I hunted the neighborhood around our hotel on Route 66 in Pasadena that morning for a folding chair in the event her knees grew suddenly weak upon meeting him, and/or she felt the need to sit and talk with him for a while.

It was bright and warm in Commerce when we arrived at the wrought iron cemetery gates. I held Barbara’s hand to steady her as we walked down the broken concrete aisle to her father’s grave, then unfolded the chair directly in front of his headstone. Then I stepped away and she started a private conversation with a man she never knew, the man whose lifelong absence had carved an unfillable cosmic hole in her heart.

Watching them chat from a respectful distance, I tried to imagine growing up without my own father, how much of who I am today would have changed, and how my impoverishment would forever demand compensation of some sort, however inadequate. Best I can do now is say thank you for your service, Paul. Thank you for Barbara. She has lived a quietly heroic life, much in your image, it seems. But you knew that all along…

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