Only at his funeral, does a family come to know and love a long neglected and shell-shocked soldier from WWI. Based on a true story. Fred Sadler has just died of old age. It's 1986, seventy years after he marched off to war, and his ghost hovers near the ceiling of the dismal nursing home. To Fred's dismay, the arrangement of his funeral falls to his prudish and disparaging sister-in-law. As Viola dominates the remembrance of Fred, his ghost agonizes over his inability to set the record straight. Was old Uncle Fred really suffering from shell shock? Why was he shut away for most of his life in the Whitby Hospital for the Insane? Why didn't his family help him more? Fred's memories of his life as a child, his family's hotel, the War, and the mental hospital, clash with Viola's version of events as the family gathers on a rainy October night to pay their respects.