Proof of Heaven

anywhere for quite some time. His new commanding officer would not
allow him to go back to the States until the situation was “more stable.”
Several months after the Japanese formally surrendered aboard the
battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Dad, at last, received general orders
releasing him to go home. However, he knew that the on-site CO would
have these orders rescinded if he saw them. So Dad waited until the
weekend, when that CO was off base for R&R, and processed the orders
through the stand-in CO. He was finally able to board a ship bound for
home in December 1945, long after most of his fellow soldiers had
returned to their families.
After coming back to the States in early 1946, Dad went on to finish
his neurosurgical training with his friend and Harvard Medical School
classmate, Donald Matson, who had served in the European Theater. They
trained at the Peter Bent Brigham and the Children’s Hospitals in Boston
(flagship hospitals of Harvard Medical School) under Dr. Franc D.
Ingraham, who had been one of the last residents trained by Dr. Harvey
Cushing, globally regarded as the father of modern neurosurgery. In the
1950s and 1960s, the entire cadre of “3131C” neurosurgeons (as they
were officially classified by the Army Air Force), who had honed their
craft on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, went on to set the bar
for the next half century of neurosurgeons, including those in my own
generation.
My parents grew up during the Depression and were hardwired for
work. Dad just about always made it home for family dinner at 7 P.M.,
usually in a suit and tie, but occasionally wearing surgical scrubs. Then
he’d return to the hospital, often taking one of us kids along to do our
homework in his office, while he made rounds on his patients. For Dad,
life and work were essentially synonymous, and he raised us accordingly.
He usually made my sisters and me do yard work on Sundays. If we told
him we wanted to go to the movies, he’d reply: “If you go to the movies,
then someone else has to work.” He was also fiercely competitive. On the
squash court, he considered every game a “battle to the death,” and even
into his eighties was always in search of fresh opponents, often decades
younger.