It’s Memorial Day. It’s not Veterans’ Day or Armed Forces Day; those are important, so important. But, it’s Memorial Day and that’s different. It’s a day that doesn’t get a “happy” in front of it, nor a “great” either. It’s Memorial Day, and we pause to honor those who “gave their last full measure of devotion.”
It’s a thing that’s hard to comprehend, thinking about all of those who laid down their lives, not necessarily for a friend, but for strangers, for an idea. There are so, so many, stretching backward in time to when the first shots sounded in the creation of our Republic. When we learn about the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, we hear names like “Washington” and “Grant”, but in between the utterances of those famous names--the ones we know, the ones we remember--are the nameless who fell for us. Or, perhaps I should say, the nameless to “us.” They are the named to someone; they are a child, a lover, a friend. There are so, so many, comprising a list whose scale is nearly impossible to grasp.
The full force of the sublimity of this feeling has hit me several times, at Arlington, at Gettysburg, and others. However, never was it so intense as when I visited the Normandy American Cemetery. Situated above a beach that men ran towards knowing full well the possibility of their own death, well, it silences you and stops you and wrecks you in its profundity. Row upon row of markers, saying here lies a man who died for you.
Six hours away from that beach, on that very day, my wife’s aunt was being born in the occupied Netherlands, in a dark, blacked-out house, a house without heat or hot water. My wife’s grandmother--my son’s great-grandmother--labored in loneliness, surrounded only by her two other children, her sister still sneaking through the streets after curfew, trying to find a doctor and her husband in England, helping the allies. Soon, Eindhoven would be liberated, and my wife’s aunt would not know occupation, all because boys and men ran up a beach for people they would never know, giving that last full measure of devotion.
How could I not be shocked to silence, standing there, above the beaches of Normandy?
But, of course, we don’t have to go that far afield to find such graves. There is a National Cemetery in Winchester and one in Culpeper as well. I went there yesterday at dusk and just sat. I encourage you to do the same. Put down your phone for a time and just be there with the dead. And make sure to read their names.
Many of us are at the pool today, on this unofficial first day of summer. And that’s okay. The fallen fell for us so that we can be free. But, it’s worth a second to pause and maybe reflect on the original name for Memorial Day: Decoration Day, so called because folks would take today to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. So, in between the bar-b-que and the swimming pools, I encourage you to take a moment and decorate the grave of a soldier. And, maybe decorate one of someone you don’t know, a stranger who laid down their life for you, a stranger.
