When the body, such that it was, arrived at the church, Irini and Reverend Iordani and I were there to meet it. Irini’s children, Eleni and Gregory, were due in that evening, along with my son, Mike. Meanwhile, prayers of blessing were to be said.
As Reverend Iordani began the prayers, Irini wept softly. When he was finished, Irini turned to me.
“I cannot see the bones.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“Okay. Because, I cannot see them. I cannot look at bones when what I have in my heart and my soul is the face and the smile of Teddy.”
“I understand,” I said.
It was actually a relief. I had worried about how she would react when she saw what was left of him.
I was staying at a hotel near the Washington Mall. I decided to leave the hotel early to give myself time to go by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall before going to the church for the funeral. I told Mike I would meet him at the church.
When I arrived at the Wall, I started on the low end and walked slowly behind a small group of people who were there to see the great landmark. The panels were arranged by date of death and each name had a diamond next to it, unless the person was an MIA. If they were an MIA, there was a plus sign next to the name. This had no religious significance, as the symbol was only used because it was an easy shape to turn into a diamond if the MIA’s remains were recovered and identified, or to turn into a circle if the MIA was discovered alive. Unfortunately, there were no names on the Wall with circles next to them.
I finally arrived at the panel that contained Teddy’s name. I ran my hand down the list until my fingers found the name Theodore P. Nikolaides. There was the dreaded diamond next to his name. For years now, I had periodically made trips here to look up the names of people I had known during the war and always there was one name without the diamond. In my mind, the symbol next to Ted’s name had not been a plus sign, but a cross. A sign of hope for me-hope for life, hope that maybe it could become a circle, even though I knew better. Somehow, Ted’s death seemed less real then. Now I couldn’t even absorb it-not even with the diamond staring back at me, not even after having my hands on his skull and sculpting his face back to life in the clay. I left the Wall and made my way toward the church, hoping to find the truth in my faith, as I had so many times before.
Michael and I walked behind the family at Arlington National Cemetery, with the black, flag-draped gun carriage ahead of us. The military personnel, somber but crisp in their dress uniforms, escorted their fallen comrade, showing their respect with snap turns and rigid, deliberate salutes. I looked out across the sea of white grave markers-a sea of fallen heroes and statesmen. Too many dead-too many still missing.
When we reached the burial site, they lifted the casket off the gun carriage and placed it on the supports over the grave. In the cool wind of that early-spring morning, the American flag waved in the breeze with the air force flag. Not far from them, the black flag of the POWs and MIAs also fluttered.
The air force pallbearers and the gun detail stood at attention on one side of the casket until the command was given for them to stand at ease. They all stood that way while Reverend Iordani once again chanted our beautiful hymns of faith and life and hope.
Reverend Iordani held in his hand a beautiful cross, which he had bought for Irini in remembrance of Teddy. When he got to Irini, he handed it to her and spoke words of comfort to her, gave a blessing to her family and then uttered the words which mean “Life to you all.”
The command came for attention and the gun detail fired a salute of three shots. As the final shot echoed through that hallowed ground, taps began to play and two of the pallbearers began to fold the flag that rested across Teddy’s casket.
With the flag neatly and tightly folded into a triangle, the senior officer approached Irini, made his precision snap turns, bent down and handed her the flag with the words “Please accept this with the thanks of a grateful nation.”
We all stood as we heard the echoed breathy rumble of jets approaching for the flyover to pay homage to their fellow pilot. Irini stood with the flag in one hand and the cross held tightly in her other, tears streaming down her face. Irini’s son, Gregory, stood on one side of her and her daughter, Eleni, stood with her husband and young daughter on the other side.
I stood at the graveside looking over at Greg, who looked so much like the father he never knew. I watched Teddy’s oldest child, Eleni, weeping into the shoulder of her husband, Pete Spiropoulos.
Their five-year-old daughter looked up at Pete and whispered, “Daddy, Pappou’s sleeping now.”
Pete nodded, squeezed her small hand and held his wife tighter. Eleni looked at the casket of the father she barely remembered, but had loved and mourned all these years. In that casket his remains finally lay at rest. I never told her or her brother and mother how little of him there was. All they knew was that the skull was in good enough shape for me to do a reconstruct. I couldn’t bear for them to know that my friend Teddy, who at five-ten stood so much larger than life, had been reduced to a skull and a handful of bone pieces no bigger than large pebbles-the sacred rubble of an unholy war.
As the jets flew over in missing-man formation, and the one plane separated and flew away from the others, I thought how like Ted’s soul it was-free at last from the prison of his anonymous grave. Not only that, but I thought how like Ted himself that plane seemed-the way he had lived his whole life-independent and strong, soaring above the rest. At last I bowed my head, thanked God again for his life and wept the tears of over thirty years.
J F Margos
