“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

I fell into conversation with someone I had known only slightly decades earlier while attending an informal social event on a Lake Michigan beach. We were alone by a bonfire in the gathering darkness as a light drizzle fell that drove the other partygoers inside. We stood silently, and then he began speaking slowly about spending time near this spot the evening before he was to report for induction into military service in the 1960s, the first step in a process that would take him to Vietnam a few months later.

Over the next half hour he haltingly told me about being a prisoner of war and about his escape to freedom months later. We were silent again for a very long time, both of us deeply moved by his story. He said he hadn’t spoken of those experiences in many years. I asked if he had told his wife and children. “No,” he said.

My bonfire confidant was certainly not alone in his reticence to share his war experiences back home. Like many other World War II veterans, my father seldom spoke about his service in Europe as an Army medic. He told me about battlefield triage, but he didn’t tell me what it was like to make life-and-death decisions in a matter of seconds. He told me about a wounded American soldier who lay screaming throughout the night between the German and American lines and how a volunteer medic was sought to treat him. He said no more, and I don’t know how it turned out. Once every few years a veteran from my father’s unit came to our small town to take my parents to dinner. My Dad’s explanation was that the man believed my father saved his life, which my father said wasn’t really the case. I never met the man or heard his story.

“Saving Private Ryan” came out a few years after my father passed away, and I remember feeling numb at its conclusion and sitting alone in the theater well after everyone had left. For the first time, I had a visceral sense of what my father’s experience may have been like. I felt the same way when I watched HBO’s “Band of Brothers,” an experience I recently relived as I watched some of the episodes I missed during its first showing, a viewing prompted by the beginning of the new HBO series, “The Pacific.”

When my father returned from Europe in 1945 his reentry into life at home was a gradual one—a slow troop ship to the United States and a period of months before he left the service and returned home. But its emotional residue stayed with him. My bonfire acquaintance spoke of events from the 1960s that decades later remained deeply rooted in his psyche.

Today, members of the armed services returning home from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only the duration of a long plane ride to bridge the world of those wars and life back home, a juxtaposition that is so abrupt it is hard to believe that post-traumatic stress disorder is not nearly universal. Like preceding generations of veterans, their lives and those of their families are as likely to be defined as much by what they do not say as what they tell us.

Experiences of war and battle, of course, are not the only life-shaping events we hold close to ourselves. It is never easy to talk about things that are painful to remember or that embarrass us or for which we believe we will be judged. And sometimes we simply cannot find the words to describe what we have experienced.

Another reason stories about life-shaping events remain unspoken is that a rising generation sometimes doesn’t fully appreciate the richness of the lives that preceded it until it is too late. But, if we are fortunate, we are allowed to see those we love more fully while they are still with us, and our lives and theirs are enriched.

It is human to desire to more deeply understand the people and events that shaped our lives. That is why storytelling, biography, and memoir will continue to compel us to pull up a comfortable chair to listen or to read.

“The bitterest tear shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone,” Harriet Beecher Stowe cautioned us. While we may not be able to cross bridges extending back in time, we can do all that’s in our power to help those closest to know us more completely by offering them the experiences that shaped our lives so that words are not left unsaid or deeds undone.

Dennis Sparks’ “Things Observed” essays and photos encourage readers to see familiar things in new ways. You can also read his blog on school leadership and contact him at dennis.sparks@comcast.net.