memoir
Helen's journal — 1 September 1939: a dream of Dale
A journal entry by fifteen-year-old Helen Louise Eesley, dated 1 September 1939, transcribed by her daughter Roberta Burnes (2026) from the original — pencil on yellow paper. Written seven weeks after Helen's brother Dale Eesley drowned at Black Lake, Michigan (14 July 1939), it records a dream that Dale had come back alive, having lost his memory and wandered off, with no one believing her that the man they buried was someone else. At the top of the same page Helen wrote a single word — 'War!' — the day Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. The grief that would shape the rest of Helen's life and the start of the war she would lose her brother Lyle to, set down on one page by a fifteen-year-old.
What it is
A single page from the journal of fifteen-year-old Helen Louise Eesley, dated 1 September 1939 — seven weeks after her brother Dale drowned at Black Lake on 14 July 1939. Her daughter Roberta Burnes found it among her mother’s papers and transcribed it in 2026; the original is pencil on yellow-lined paper. A photograph of the page is below.
At the top of the page, Helen wrote one word about the wider world — “War!” — on the very day Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Below it, she wrote about the war inside her own house.
Transcription
War!
Sept. 1, 1939
I had a dream last night about Dale, that he had come back and that he had lost his memory and wandered off — no one would believe me when I told them he had come back and that the man we buried was someone else. I was so glad to see him — so was he to see me — but then I awoke and realized that in a week I’ll be going back to school, without him — it’s going to be hard.
What it records
The dream of return. The shape of the dream is the shape of early grief: Dale isn’t dead, only lost; the body in the grave is a mistake; if only someone would believe her. The detail that “no one would believe me” is the loneliest part — even in the dream, the loss is hers to carry alone. It is the same wound the family later read in the chocolate-across-the-lake guilt Helen carried for the next sixty-one years.
“In a week I’ll be going back to school, without him.” The grief is dated and concrete: the new school year is about to start, and for the first time it will start without her brother. A fifteen-year-old measuring loss not in the abstract but by the calendar of an ordinary autumn.
“War!” The one-word headline at the top of the page is its own small astonishment. On the day the world’s war began — the war that would, three years later, take her brother Lyle at Cabanatuan — what filled Helen’s journal was the brother she had already lost. The public catastrophe and the private one, on a single sheet of yellow paper.
Source: original journal page in Roberta Burnes Walker’s keeping; transcription by Roberta 2026; photograph emailed to Chuck Eesley and added to the archive June 2026.
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