Peace a Long Time Coming

In her memoir Otherwise, I’m Fine, Barbara Presnell finds the path to reconciliation as she follows her father’s footsteps during World War II.

When she was 14, Presnell’s father went in for minor surgery and never came out of the hospital. After his funeral, her mother gathered together her three children and told them, “Life will be different, but we will be fine. We don’t need to dwell on this, we don’t need to fall apart. We are strong. We will move on.”

For Barbara, this would lead to a decades-long period of repressed mourning, resulting in depression and estrangement from her family. Her memoir recounts the pain of that time and how retracing her father’s steps during World War II brought her peace and a renewed relationship with her family.

Told through a series of vignettes, weaving and connecting the past and the present, Otherwise I’m Fine is a poignant reminder of the unintentional pain that we can inflict on each other. The pain of Bill Presnell’s death shook the family, but no one was able to break through the silence of their individual grief. Edwin, the older brother, had college to distract him. Ellen, the middle child, had a group of supportive friends. But Barbara, who had felt like her father’s double, who had been his partner on fishing trips and visits to the mill where he worked, had no outlet for her grief. Her mother also had no way to talk with her children about the loss. They went each Sunday to clean up around his grave, working in silence. Once, when Ellen was cheerful from a good day in school, telling a funny story at dinner and laughing, her mother stopped her: “There is nothing funny in this house.”

Barbara is surprised and not especially pleased when her siblings want to join her on a 2014 trip to retrace their father’s wartime path. But the journey allows time for them to remember and think of their father without the heavy pain they all suffered from his death and its aftermath. After she and her brother explore the Fox Red beachfront, where her father landed at Omaha Beach, Barbara thinks, “We’ve done this thing together from the start. Something has shifted between the two of us. Maybe I could like him. Maybe I could love him.”

 But Presnell also confronts a bigger story of the memories, still alive in Europe, of the Nazi takeovers and the loyalty to the Americans seen as saviors. At the road to Omaha Beach, there are American, British, and Canadian flags flying from buildings and homes. Their tour guide says, as they leave, “The French people owe so much to you, and we will not forget.” In Belgium, they meet Vince Heggen, who takes them on a tour of his private WWII museum and asks them to sign a U.S. flag: “I’ve gathered signatures on my flag of all the 30th Infantry soldiers who have come through. I would be proud if you sign for your father.”

Then there is Philipe Krings who lost his younger brother in the war and still hates Germany more than 60 years later: “I hate Germany. Everything-the language, the people, the food, the land. I hate it all.” He lives close enough to walk across the border, but, for him, it is still enemy territory. But he also remembers the American soldiers, the ones who gave Christmas stockings to the children of the city.

There is a great deal of grief in this memoir: A family grieving separately instead of helping each other through the darkness. An old man still grieving the loss of a little brother. And grief for all the lost opportunities. But Presnell also brings us hope that families can be reunited and the scars of war can bring reconciliation if we’ll just listen to their stories.