PRO CONNECT

Ruth W. Crocker

Online Profile
Author welcomes queries regarding

Ruth W. Crocker is an author and playwright. Her essays have been recognized in Best American Essays and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her magazine and journal articles have been featured in The Gettysburg Review, Grace Magazine, O-Dark-Thirty, T.A.P.S. Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post. She writes about family, resilience, coping with the death of loved ones, the aftermath of war, life after personal tragedy, and the writing process. She was recently honored by an invitation to the White House for breakfast on Memorial Day, 2014, where she presented her memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War, to President Obama.

THOSE WHO REMAIN Cover
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

THOSE WHO REMAIN

BY Ruth W. Crocker • POSTED ON May 13, 2014

Crocker’s memoir about her decision to disinter the coffin where she buried her husband’s letters 40 years earlier, after his death in Vietnam.

In 1969, when Crocker (The Secret Life of Louisa May Alcott, 2013) was 23, her husband Dave was killed in the Vietnam War. They had been married for three years. Distraught, the widow decided that she would not bury his remains but scatter his ashes on the north face of the Eiger, a difficult slope Dave had longed to climb. She placed his letters and photographs, her wedding dress and his Army uniform inside his coffin. The funeral director told her, “Just remember you can’t dig this up. This is permanent.” Crocker was glad to let these memories rest for four decades, until, she writes, “I simply changed my mind.” In 2011, Crocker had the coffin disinterred. She describes this process in the first chapter but leaves readers on the brink of discovering what was inside until the book’s final pages. Since the intervening chapters don’t quote from any of those letters, the final revelation may be anticlimactic. The real focus isn’t on the drama of disinterment but on Crocker’s buried memories, too painful to look at for so many years. With thoughtfulness and grace, she reconstructs the young woman she was (and the family she came from), how she met Dave, what kind of man he was—universally admired and beloved, according to all who served with or met him—being a young military wife, early widowhood, the experience of grief and how she slowly recovered. Her decades-later camaraderie with Dave’s fellow soldiers becomes especially healing. Crocker turns a nice phrase; she says after her husband’s funeral, “The house was jammed with sadness, packed solid with the smother of something terrible.” Some moments (opening the coffin, arriving at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), however, are elongated in a way that doesn’t create suspense, just impatience.

A moving exploration of widowhood.

Pub Date: May 13, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-940863-00-9

Page count: 283pp

Publisher: Elm Grove

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014

Awards, Press & Interests

Day job

Writer

Favorite author

Carol Shields

Favorite book

The Stone Diaries

Favorite line from a book

The ocean is made of drops. Mother Teresa in "Love Until It Hurts" by Daphne Rae

Favorite word

magnificent

Hometown

Mystic, Connecticut

Passion in life

to find and tell stories

Unexpected skill or talent

math

Close Quickview