Perish the Day I Was Born

Perish the Day I was Born
Job 3: 1-26

I never knew my Uncle Billy, my mother’s younger brother. The year I was born, he was killed in combat in the Second World War in North Africa. I did know my Uncle Ray, the husband of my mother’s older sister, who was also a combat soldier in that war. He was a quiet, demure man. I associate him with the garden shed where he spent much of his time doing woodwork and creating beautiful things. I remember the time when I was a boy, when someone from the family arrived at our house to tell us that he had hanged himself in his shed. He could no longer live with the memories of what had happened in the war, of what he had seen or of what he had had to do or of what had been done to him...