I moved to New York City when I was 21 to work in book publishing. I had a tiny “room of my own” in the Flatiron building to fill with books. I could barely afford to-go coffee, but I’d go to literary readings in the city almost every night. Uptown to Book Culture on Broadway; downtown to the Strand. I volunteered at the PEN World Voices Festival every May, spent summers playing basketball in the WORD Brooklyn League, and attended launch parties in the fall at McNally Jackson in Soho and powerHouse Books in DUMBO.
My day job as a book publicist let me talk about books I loved all day long. The best part was planning author tours, when I’d connect my writers with booksellers and send them out into the world for readings around the country, rooting for them on the road from Elliot Bay to The Tattered Cover to Politics & Prose.
All the while, my mother was sick at home in our small town near Boston. She was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer during my senior year of college, yet insisted I move to New York City to follow my dreams—after all, they were once hers; she’d been the editor of a small journal before giving it up to raise my sister and me.
I became intimately acquainted with the weekend schedule of the Chinatown bus to Boston. When I couldn’t be with Mom in person, I’d send her packages of books, filled with all the words I couldn’t bring myself to say to her.
During our one and only conversation about the fact that she was dying, Mom handed me a small, leather slip of a book her father had carried with him in Stalag 17 prison camp, where he spent nearly three years as a prisoner of the Nazis during World War II. I’d grown up with his stories of survival in Stalag 17 and Mom had, too. There was a strict curfew in the camps, but each night, my grandfather defied it to read to his fellow prisoners. My grandfather could have been killed by his captors for reading aloud, but in a landscape of so much death, his actions were a defiant reminder of life.
I had seen Mom take the book to her chemotherapy sessions. She had underlined one passage that reverberates across the decades: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed… I will strengthen thee.” I don’t know if Mom read those words to feel closer to God or closer to her father; all I know was that they drew her out of her ailing body and into a place of hope.
When Mom died, I inherited Grandpa’s book… alongside boxes of letters, declassified CIA documents, and newspaper clippings about a man I’d never met: my uncle Jack, who disappeared when his plane was shot down over Laos in 1972 during the CIA-led “Secret War” there. I’d grown up celebrating Grandpa’s service; my uncle’s had always been a mystery to me.
Through the words my grandfather left behind, I learned that he had devoted the rest of his life to looking for his son and died believing that his son still lived. I thought Mom and I shared everything, but I was wrong; even as she herself was getting ready to leave me, she was trying to protect me from the grief that had been hers. Mom lost Jack at the same age I lost her.
In 2013, still reeling with grief, I traveled to Laos in search of answers about the mystery that had haunted my family for decades. What I found in that jungle led me closer to the family I’d lost and the mysteries of a war that left Laos the most heavily bombed country in the world.