Love, Jimmy

A Biography

By Nina M. Osier

Back when Private First Class James E. Osier realized something bad was happening to him in the course of his World War II Army service, it wasn’t spoken about at all. He didn’t know that his life’s toughest battle was just beginning, or that he would be fighting it for the next six decades.

Whether he won or lost, ultimately, I leave for my readers to judge. I have simply set down his story, as I recall it and as he told it to me over the years. From the day of his death until this one, I’ve felt that I had unfinished business with my dad. That business is now complete.

Give my love to both sides of the family and all friends, my regards to the enemys. —Pfc. James E. Osier, Nineteenth U.S. Infantry, Schofield Barracks; closing a letter to his sister, Margaret Osier Partridge, on June 21, 1941.

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Cover art Maggie Dix

Chapter 1: Home Thoughts



Illustration 1: A view of Friendship, Maine’s offshore islands (photo by Elaine Osier Crockett)

“There’s a container inside the cardboard box, and there’s a plastic tab you’ll pull to open it,” the funeral director told me as I held my father’s cremated remains in my arms. The package (sent by parcel post from the crematorium in Portland to the funeral home in Gardiner—the small central Maine city where I grew up) surprised me with its weight. So did the $17 or so in postage stamps on its plain brown outer wrapper. The end of a life, this life that 49 years ago kindled mine, shouldn’t be so…mundane.

Then again, maybe it should. We weren’t having a funeral, a memorial service, visiting hours, or any such ceremony, at Dad’s own request. He’d lived his almost 80 years quietly, he’d chosen to die as privately as he could, and now he’d (as he put it) “gone home.” So disposing of his worn out body should be done just as quietly, and just as privately. And just as matter of factly, too.

I put the package on my little car’s front passenger seat, and I drove the few miles from Gardiner to my older sister’s home in East Pittston. It was a perfect summer afternoon. Sunny, clear, with just a few white clouds—puffy, innocuous ones, not the storm clouds that a Maine fisherman hates to see coming—high in the bright blue sky. Warm without being unpleasantly hot (I was wearing a tee shirt and shorts), with only the lightest of breezes stirring the tree leaves along the country road where Sis and her husband of 35 years had their home.

Just us two. His oldest child, and his youngest. The two he was able to raise himself—and the two who, in his last years, worked together (along with his beloved son-in-law) to oversee his care. Elaine joined me in the car, and an hour’s worth of picturesque country roads later we were in the coastal fishing village where our father was born.

I drove down the road toward the town of Friendship’s public boat ramp, at the end of Bradford’s Point. Elaine pointed out to me where the house once stood in which Dad’s older sister Elizabeth, who’d died just a month earlier, lived when Elaine (almost seven years my senior) was small. She talked about staying with Aunt Betty while Dad was working, at a time when I didn’t yet exist, and about how long a walk it was for a small child from that house to the boat landing.

Bradford’s Point ends in a bar that’s completely out of water at low tide, connecting the mainland and Garrison Island. There were cars parked along both sides of the narrow road that led down a paved ramp to the jumbled rocks that on this part of the Maine coast, we dignify with the misnomer of “beach.” I managed to slip into a space on the road’s left side, and we got out (leaving Dad’s ashes behind, for the moment) and walked down to the shore and looked around.

The beach was vacant, although there was plenty happening on the water. Lobster boats hauling traps, a sloop (that I thought might belong to a nearby children’s summer camp) under sail…this was always a busy place, where the Medomak River enters the ocean. I could remember when Dad was one of the men working here, and so could Elaine.

We went back to the car. I carried the cremains in their discreet black plastic container, the shipping box removed, and Elaine carried my Bible (the old one, a red King James edition that Dad used during his last months at the Veterans’ Home because his own Bible had fallen apart at last) and a bouquet of wild flowers from her field. She’d tied it carefully with raffia, so she could throw it into the ocean after Dad’s ashes.