Post-War Photos

Over the course of 15 years after the war, he built up a successful private practice in general and thoracic surgery—too successful, in fact. He was every bit as dedicated to his private patients as he was to soldiers wounded on the battlefields of western Europe. Because his was a solo practice, he worked constantly; he was always out of the house early and back late. He sometimes missed our birthdays and was frequently called away on holidays. He never took more than one week of vacation a year. It was a murderous schedule.

So in 1961, when his 2nd Aux colleague Gordon Madding asked him to join his practice in northern California, he readily agreed. When the three post-war children complained about leaving Buffalo, our mother told us that the move would add ten years to his life.

Ironically, then, the last years of his life were dismal. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the early 80’s, forcing his immediate retirement. He would live until 1993, increasingly disabled and increasingly demented.

When he could still speak but was becoming more and more confused, he would look at my mother and say “I want to go home.” She thought he meant their previous house, which he had loved and which they had to sell when he could no longer negotiate the stairs. I’m not so sure. I think that in the fog of his disease, he found himself back in those miserable, homesick years of war and that, in the end, not only did he lose his physical and mental capacities, he lost his home again, and this time forever.

Still, nothing could break their marriage. In absolute devotion, our mother cared for him at home, every day—year after year—a bitter, heartbreaking duty, as the Paul Kennedy who loved her so fiercely slipped away, gradually but relentlessly. Through all those years she took care of him by herself. To the end. To the end.

This passage is adapted from Battlefield Surgeon: Life and Death on the Front Lines of World War II (University Press of Kentucky, 2016).