Memorial Day is a holiday to honor those who died while serving the country.

While my grandfather, Ross Pember Calder, didn’t die while serving, I consider him a casualty of war.

Because of that, I never got to meet him as he died 13 years before I was born.

He lived in Durham and served in World War I, where he was mustard-gassed and contracted tuberculosis as a result.

My father was serving in the Southwest Pacific in the U.S. Navy in World War II when he got word his father had died.

The story of his death haunts me.

My grandfather was sick with TB most of my father’s young life; so sick, in fact, that they took him to a TB hospital, known back then as a sanitorium, in Vermont, leaving his wife, my grandmother, with his parents on their farm in Durham. My father, Edwin Ross Calder, was an only child. Years later he told us many stories of the farm and his grandparents who helped raise him because his own father was so ill. They had a work horse and large vegetable gardens and raspberry bushes on the farm, which my father loved. It was, for him, a heaven on earth.

My father was 25 in 1943 and on a Navy ship when he learned of his father’s death.

Knowing he would die soon in the Vermont sanitorium, Ross Pember Calder wanted to go home to the farm. He left the hospital on his own and took a bus to Maine, to Lisbon Falls. He started walking toward Durham.

Although very ill, he walked all night, for several miles until, too weak to continue, he began to crawl. He made to the front lawn of his parents’ farm where he died and where, in the morning, his family found him.

My father told us this long ago, although my memory of it faded over the years, I think because it was too painful to contemplate.

Recently, my brother, David, recounted the story. In it, I am reminded of the sacrifices that not only my grandfather, but all who served, made for our country. And their families sacrificed as well.

Unlike my grandfather, my own father lived a long life, dying in 2010 at 92. When he was in his 70s, he watched and was captivated by “The Trip to Bountiful,” a 1985 film starring Geraldine Page, who won an Oscar for her performance. It is about an old woman who, without telling anyone, strikes out from her son and daughter-in-law’s apartment where she lived in Houston to return to her rural childhood home — a sad but wonderful story of which my father spoke often.

As he grew older and drove shorter distances, he would ask one of my siblings drive him to his “Bountiful” — Lisbon Falls and Durham where he grew up — to revisit his old home and acquaintances still living. My husband Phil drove him there one summer and returned with many stories.

They had to ask around to find some of my father’s old friends and discovered one was in a nursing home. They entered his room and found him lying flat in his bed. My father drew close and looked into the old man’s face. Phil recalled he was astonished to hear the man immediately exclaim “Hi, Ed!” though the friends hadn’t seen each other in more than a half-century.

I’m comforted that, unlike my grandfather, Dad was able to return to bountiful with success.  I suspect that while doing so, he thought of his father’s own sad journey home.

They were a father and son, bound by blood and both scarred by war. I’ll think of them on Memorial Day.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 37 years. Her columns appear here Sundays. She is the author of the book, “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at [email protected]. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com