Last night I was trying to decided what to make my next bedside reading. I looked on my kindle and thought I would reread The Scarlet Letter, but after eight or ten pages of the first chapter I set it aside. Maybe another time. Then I turned to a Chesterton book on my kindle, The Crimes of England. That was a bust too. Too much concentration needed. Then I remembered that I have a book written by Stalin's daughter that I've been wanting to read. So I went over and looked for it on the biography bookshelf, but a little volume caught my eye and I pulled it out. It was a small biography of Joyce Kilmer. I opened it and began reading and was a third of the way through it before setting it down and turning off the light. When I was at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., Joyce Kilmer's granddaughter was two years behind me. We never got to know each other, I didn't think about it at the time, but she never knew her grandfather. He was killed in World War I at the age of 31. Even his own children likely remembered little about him. I am only beginning to realize myself how true the title of this post is. It was the statement of Fr. Francis Duffy, military chaplain. Kilmer's military brothers found him on a little hill where they thought he was examining the area. He was dead with a bullet in the brain. He was buried in France near the spot where he was killed. A memorial Mass was said for him at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on October 14, 1918.
