THE TWELVE-WORD LETTER
Marine Sergeant Mark Jensen returned from a battlefield of dust and blood. Three years prior, he had wiped away the tears and dismissed the weak pleas of his mother, Eleanor, a widowed, frail woman who had only him for support. “I have to go, Mom. It’s my duty. I promised the Nation,” Mark had said, his voice as hard as the armor plate he wore. Eleanor only looked at him silently, her sorrow etched into every wrinkle.
On the day of his return, there were no bugles or celebratory flags. Mark only wanted to go home, hug his mother, and say the apology, the regret he had suppressed all that time. But when the taxi stopped at the familiar suburban neighborhood, his heart felt like it was being squeezed tight.
The small, blue wooden house where he grew up, where his mother’s apple pie and herbal tea always smelled fragrant, was now just a pile of rubble: broken bricks, rotten wood, and concrete debris piled up.
“What happened?” Mark rushed out of the car, his heavy backpack falling onto the street.
He panicked, running across the empty lot, searching for a familiar face. He found an elderly woman, Mrs. Miller, his old neighbor.
“Mrs. Miller! My mother, Eleanor… where is she?”
Mrs. Miller looked at him with pity: “Oh, Mark. You’re back… This area was rezoned, demolished eight months ago. Everyone had to move. Your mother… she was very weak, much weaker than you thought.” She shook her head regretfully, sighed, and turned away. “Some moved to the city, others passed away… no one knows where your mother went.”
Unable to accept the cruel truth, Mark plunged into the wreckage like a madman. He sifted through every plank, every brick, his fingernails bleeding. He wasn’t looking for money or possessions; he only hoped for a trace, a souvenir, a photograph.
After several hours, his hand touched something hard, carefully wrapped in an old canvas cloth. His heart pounded. Here it is! Mom left him something. Mark carefully unwrapped the cloth, revealing a quarter-folded, yellowed piece of paper.
A brief joy flashed, and he tremblingly opened the paper. His mother’s familiar handwriting, shaky and faint. He took a deep breath and slowly read the twelve words written there:
“You were responsible to the nation but unfilial to your mother.”
The joy vanished, turning into a painful, suffocating sob. Mark collapsed onto the ashes, clutching the note to his chest. The cry of the war-hardened soldier was now more agonizing than any gunfire he had ever heard—the cry of a son who had chosen the Nation over his family, only to lose both. His mother’s last message was the bitterest accusation he would carry for the rest of his life.
