Dear Commodore,

There are six feet of dirt and almost one hundred and two years between us. We finally made the drive to Cassville, Missouri, when we found out this is where you were laid to rest. I’ve known about you for a few years now; my grandpa is your great-grandson, which would make me your great-great-great-granddaughter. That seems wild to write out all those ‘greats’, and even wilder to think that because of just one marriage, I am now a part of your family tree. I’ve learned a little about you over the last couple of years, but at the same time, I know that I know nothing about you. Sure, I know you were born in 1845, and I’ve been able to assemble a timeline of sorts…the names of your parents, siblings, wife, and kids. I know you were only seventeen when you decided to volunteer three of your years to fight for the North in the 8th Missouri Cavalry from 1862-1865. I even have a copy of your discharge papers that describe what you looked like. Five feet eight inches tall, with tanned skin and blue eyes. I know you fought in the Battle of Prairie Grove, and I’ve visited that battlefield several times just because I knew you had been there too. I also know you married a gal from Tennessee named Nannie (which is funny to me because your great-grandson, Tim, married my grandma, who we call “Nanny”). It’s the things about you that I can’t find in documents that I wish I knew.

I’m not exactly sure why I’ve been drawn to you since Tim told me about you a few years ago. I guess you represented something that I have always been curious about. I was in the local college studying American History-specifically the Civil War, when Tim made a scan of your discharge papers to give me. I was enamored with your life that I had just learned about, and I started digging into it, hungry for whatever I could learn. You were a real live link to a time and place I had spent years wondering, reading, and studying about. I never pursued studying military history. I wasn’t interested in the tactics and maneuvers in war; it was the lives of the men and women I wanted to know about. I wanted to know you. What your thoughts were, what you sounded like, what you felt, and what you heard. Were you pressured to join the fight, or were you passionate about it? You volunteered three years of your life. What were you feeling in that moment when you signed on? You weren’t married yet, and you had no kids at that point. Did you wonder if you’d ever live to have a family? Since you served with the cavalry, I have to assume you were a horseman, which would make sense since you listed your occupation as a farmer. I have so many questions to ask you, and they linger in my mind more than what you could probably imagine. Which leads me to one more question…did you ever think about us? The ones farther down in your lineage? I find myself making decisions, living life, writing about, and praying over the generations after me. I sometimes wonder if any of them will wonder about us the way I wonder about you.

It’s easy for me to assign traits to you. It’s easy to think you were an honorable, upstanding man who fought for what he believed in and then went on to live a life full of meaning. It’s easy for me to imagine you falling in love with a girl named Nannie and being overcome with love for each new baby that was born to you both. It’s even easier for me to take pride in the fact that my great-great-great-grandpa farmed, fought, and lived on the land that I’ve come to love so much. Sometimes, though, a cloud of reality settles over my wonderings like fog blocking the morning light. I don’t know you. I don’t know if you were harsh or kind. If you laughed and had fun. If you suffered from your service, or if you look back on it, just glad that you survived. I don’t know if you had hobbies, friends, or a favorite dessert. I don’t know the husband, father, or man you were. But I do know this: I’ll always wonder.

On a hilltop looking over the Little League fields in Cassville, in row four of the Oak Hill Cemetery in Barry County, is where I finally got to sit in front of you and let everything I’ve ever wondered about you rise to the surface. Not many people would probably say they like visiting cemeteries, but I do. Not because it brings me joy, but because as I sat there in front of your headstone, I was reminded of the sobering truth I always feel when I visit one. Our time here on this earth is but a vapor, and each headstone is like a bookmark representing the stopping place of someone’s life story. It’s always a recalibration moment for me to sit with the Lord and examine where I’m at in life. Am I taking every opportunity to love others well? To share the hope and love of Jesus? To leave a legacy that’s worth passing on to the next generations, after all that’s left of me is a stone that stands as a bookmark of my own life? I don’t know everything about you, Commodore P. Ethridge, but there’s something about you that will always make me wonder.