There are lots of pictures around my house. Pictures of friends, pictures of family, and a lot of black and white pictures—copies of pictures that I borrowed from my grandmother, and a few from my mother.

There are certain pictures that draw me in: A pictures of cousin Billy, who died as a child, sitting on a tricycle, starting at a camera; A picture of my father and cousin Billy climbing a tree in my great-grandparent’s yard. But one picture seems to prey on my thoughts when I let me mind wander.

It is of my grandfather in his Air Force uniform and my great-grandfather in his Navy uniform. Both are ready to do their part for their country in World War II. For my grandfather, the Air Force would become his career, taking him, my grandmother, my mother, and her siblings all over the country and Europe until he retired in the late ’60s or early ‘70s.

They are standing, arms around each other, in the way that people only stand in pictures, with the hills of Luke behind them. (As least I assume it’s Luke. My information about my mother’s family is sparse at best.) My grandfather is just back from basic training—you can see even in the small reproduction the pale line on his forehead from wearing his hat, while the rest of his face is tanned. My great-grandfather looks, to me, nearly the same as he does in pictures taken decades later. Yet something reminds me a bit of the wooden Popeye Christmas tree ornament that goes onto my parent’s tree every year.

But it’s not really the people in the picture who draw my thoughts, but the people who are not in the picture: my grandmother and my great-grandmother. My grandmother, a newlywed, who had moved to the United States from Canada. How did she feel about this new country, and this new family? About leaving all her family miles and miles away to come here by herself? In later years she apparently bitterly regretted her decision, but what did she feel then?

And my great-grandmother. A tiny woman who I can still remember, though the memories I prefer are those of her in her house at the top of the mountain, instead of in the nursing home, which I remember as a place of nothing but chaos and pain. But that too was far in the future.

It is my great-grandmother’s thoughts and feelings that I tend to ponder. How did she feel sending off to war not just her husband, but also her only son? Luke was, at least in my memories, a tiny rural community. Did she wonder about the events in far away Europe that were taking her husband and her son away from her?

There was no e-mail. Few phones. No CNN. Only newspapers and letters home—letters received weeks after they were written. I can hardly imagine receiving such a letter—the author may have been safe weeks before when the letter was written, but that could hardly be a reassurance of how things were at the time the letter was read.

I don’t know if any such letters to my great-grandmother exist. Probably not, since my mother would likely have ended up with them, and I’ve never heard her mention them. But my great-grandmother must have received them. Letters from her husband. Letters from her son.

When I look at that picture, I realize that there is so much of the past that is lost, that I will never know. Where did my great-grandfather serve during WWII? Where did my grandfather? What did they do? My grandfather’s stories were passed onto my cousins, but not to me. Any stories that my great-grandfather told would have belonged to my mother, but if there were any, I have never heard her tell of them.

But mostly I think about the two women who aren’t in the picture. I wonder about their thoughts and feelings, and how such a thing changed their lives in ways I can’t even imagine.

A picture may very well paint a thousand words, but for me, those words are long lost, and I am left with nothing but an image of two men, smiling at the camera, ready to go off to war. And the knowledge that off camera were two women who would stay behind.