My grandmother's cookie jar

This cookie jar was a gift to my grandmother, Maria, from Jenny Marchese. Jenny was engaged to my uncle Frank. I never met Frank or Jenny. Frank was a casualty of WWII. Jenny later married someone else. Aunt, uncle, cousins ... lost to war.

Frank and Jenny met in a government employment office. She asked his assistance in filling out an application. In the course of filling out the forms they discovered that they both had the same family name... Marchese. A courtship ensued.

For most of my adult life I had this cookie jar on my kitchen counter. I filled it with homemade cookies. It was only recently that I tucked it away on the top shelf out of sight.

In my mind this cookie jar became a receptacle for the grief that war doles out on families...the heartbreak endured by mothers and fathers, by lovers, by sisters and brothers.
I decided that it was OK to take a break from being a constant witness to all that sorrow. The daily death toll from Iraq made looking at this cookie jar a reminder of so much potential lost.

My grandmother never emerged from mourning for her son. I heard it spoken in whispers many times that 'she died of a broken heart'. The loss of her son was not something she could leave behind.

My uncle Frank was buried outside Florence along with 4,400 other American servicemen killed between June 1944 and May 1945 in Italy. The Florence American Cemetery and Memorial site covers 70 acres just south of Florence in the hills of Tuscany. A monument there also pays tribute to another 1400 servicemen who were lost or MIA.

I plan to get there one day to stand among all those crosses... to whisper my gratitude to Uncle Frank.