Still Life, Margaret Preston; 1957 (National Gallery of Art)

BUCK writes:

In an earlier entry, I mentioned that my sister became pregnant at the age of 19. She ended up marrying the much older man for his name only. She never saw him again after the wedding.

Last year, my niece — my sister’s daughter who was now age forty nine — learned via a persistent phone call to her mother, that her father was dead. My sister twice hung up on the unfamiliar caller, who asked questions that annoyed her, rather than getting to the point and seizing her attention.

She finally told my sister that she had cared for Mr. So-and-So up until his death. “Are you his daughter’s mother?” The caller was looking for financial reward, but turned out to be the only other living person who knew that the man had a daughter. She called everyone she could find with his last name.

An Internet search discovered an obituary naming two nieces in Colorado as the beneficiaries of his estate in Florida. A Florida attorney was hired and the two nieces, both my sister’s age, then learned about his daughter. My sister and niece went to Florida and the undisputed estate was settled. The two nieces came to Washington D.C. to see their uncle off and to meet and visit with my sister and niece who welcomed them and showed them around for several days, before saying farewell, likely for good.

Within just months of fifty years after this senior Army officer stationed at the Pentagon impregnated a young woman just out of high school, he is transported by her and his never-known daughter back to the D.C. area. He waits, ironically, for several days on the floor in my sister’s hall closet before a formal, but ritual military ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. My niece placed her father’s ash urn into his eternal resting place, a numbered limestone vault. She returned home with a folded U.S. flag.

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