Sally Huggins Toner

I was one of those children whose father never let her win in a game of Monopoly…or poker…or horseshoes. I mean, he would have, if I had actually won. My mother teased him about his competitiveness as I threw down my tin hat, silver dog, and acknowledged defeat. It was always very important to him that, when I won, I would know I’d really earned it.

To this day, I am grateful for his disdain of the “everyone should get a trophy” attitude. His honesty, if not sometimes brutal, was necessary. The world is a brutal place. But he always made me believe I was capable of beating it. If I applied myself. If I fought to get better.

He was always honest about his own struggles too. I think that’s why he trounced me in Uno. At our core, we are both dreamers. We both imagine that anything is possible. That if we just keep trying, we can accomplish anything. Make everything and everyone okay.

Except when we can’t.

And when we can’t, we need to figure out how to do better.

My father has an ego. You have to have one to be a physician. And you have to have one to be a fighter pilot. I think it’s the latter that allowed him to be the former, on many levels. That is what I’m thinking about on this particular Veteran’s Day. 

He landed jets on a postage stamp floating in the water. He flew faster than the speed of sound–on many occasions. He ate bugs as part of survival training. He avoided ground fire and contemplated name, rank, and serial number in case he got shot down. He also taught me how to drive (which, for the record, he has said was far more terrifying than any of those other things.) 

He also retook linear algebra to get into medical school as he accepted the role of father to a little girl who needed one. He sat next to that little girl when she was receiving chemo infusions 44 years later. Has he served? You betcha.

But back to the winning. On Veteran’s Day, we don’t thank military personnel for victory. We don’t say, “Thanks for kicking ass.” We say, instead, “Thanks for your service.” I think that is one of the most important lessons my father taught me. That real winning is just that. Service. 

In recent years, Dad has become a hospice volunteer. Not wearing the title of retired diagnostic radiologist, but as a civilian having gone through the training like everyone else. The interesting thing about his hospice work is that he has fallen back on another identity–that of veteran. Dad naturally gravitated towards retired service members even before he considered training for hospice. He loves history, and he is a fantastic listener. So I think it was, at first, a fascination with the details of their stories.

Still, it was always more than that. He was raised by his own father, another Navy veteran, to honor sacrifice. To try to give people the acknowledgement of a job well done–a promise honored. I’ve seen him collect the medals of friends, place them in shadow boxes to hang in the homes of their children. I’ve seen him research flight records and make contacts with his own squadron and others’ to verify, validify, missions completed long ago. He is a participant in a specific initiative entitled, “We Honor Veterans.” I’ll take this opportunity to share the website here: https://www.wehonorveterans.org/ It’s an offshoot of hospice that addresses the particular needs of veterans and their families. Check it out. They do good work. And Happy Veterans Day. In the name of service–a human victory. The best kind.