His stern, serious face appeared on a website photo when my mother asked my father to confirm his identity. Yes, that’s the same photo we have of him, dad declared. The photo was taken in the 1940s when my grandfather was serving in the war as Lieutenant-Colonel in command of the West Nova Scotia Regiment. I remembered a gentler, post-war version of him, who hugged us whenever we visited, cooked our favourite spaghetti and meatball dinner, and watched Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night. As was normal, he never talked about the war, and we never asked.
The question for us in 2005, when the photo mysteriously appeared on the Internet, was why? And who had posted this photo? He had been dead for over 20 years at that point.
Mom, who was not too technically inclined, forwarded me the webpage. It was from a URL in the United Kingdom. Intrigued, I scrolled around when I read the words: Your Son Is Looking For You. Son, I wondered? He only had two sons: my dad and his younger brother, both living in Nova Scotia at the time.
But of course, he had served in England, Italy, and Holland during almost the entire war…so I connected the dots within a minute of seeing the photo. There was an email address for a John Richard Nokes “who would love to meet his father and know more about his Canadian roots”.
Mom asked dad to contact Mr. Nokes but he refused.
She asked me what to do and I said “it’s a no brainer, contact the guy and tell him who his father was”. He even wrote on the website that he’d “spent much of [his] adult life trying to find [his] father, but met a brick wall at every turn”. Everybody wants to know who their father was, I told her.
When mom e-mailed him, a message came back, but unfortunately, it was not from Mr. Nokes. Seems he had died about two years before we’d found the website, around 2003; a sad moment for all.
Mr. Nokes would never know about his Canadian father, and learn that there was much more to that stern, serious face in the only photo that Mr. Nokes would ever have seen of his father. I was sad too, because I had many photos and 8mm movies of my grandfather that I would have gladly shared with my newfound uncle. The “what if” stayed with me for days, as I conjured up memories of my grandfather that might have brought him back to life and help Mr. Nokes break through his “brick wall”. But time marched on, as it always does, and never allowed it. Father and son, united only in death.