067 - On remembering and decorating

A reflection ahead of Memorial Day

Welcome back (or welcome)!

My friend Jim died a couple years ago. He was a saxophone player, a composer, an academic administrator. He was also an Army vet. I have a couple of his World War 2 books, taken with Irene’s blessing. Books from a personal library, particularly when one has been embossed by the owner, matter to me.

Earlier this year, I read Citizen Soldiers, by Stephen Ambrose. It provides a soldier-level view of the time from June 7, 1944, through May 7, 1945, from the day after D-Day to the end of the war in Europe.

I’ve read other war histories, but not since I’ve become familiar with death and grief as a chaplain. Ambrose describes battles and military campaigns and talks about the daily deaths on both sides of the battle lines. Often the deaths resulted from bad strategy at senior levels. Other times they were the result of what was seen as the only way to accomplish the military and political goals.

Whatever the strategy, the result is that individual people, mostly men, in their 20s and 30s, died in and as a result of fighting. And people lost family members overseas. And that people who lived, not fought, in Europe, and around the Pacific and Japan, and in Africa, Russia, and China, died, too.

60,000,000 people may have died during that war, as a result of that war.

We talk a lot about finding meaning in death and in deaths. And struggle while remembering the lives of the people who may have died in situations with little meaning. Miss Freres, my junior high social studies teacher quoted Robert Burns occasionally, though it wasn’t until just now that I knew the source: “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.” I probably learned that from her in in 1969. As I think about it now, she would have known the post-war years, understood the effects of all that death on all those people.

She was a teacher. She studied social studies. She taught us that phrase.

Though I think that Burns may have been more accurate if he wrote, “Man’s humanity to man.”

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Every year in the US, on the last Monday in May, there is a Federal holiday called Memorial Day, “an annual day of remembrance to honor all those who have died in service to the United States during peace and war.”

And every year, there are comments about Memorial Day not being the same as Veterans Day, and not being for all deaths, but specifically for those in the service who died in service.

That said, I remember going to the Memorial Day service in the cemetery in Webster, Wisconsin and then stopping by the little township cemetery out in Perida, the one where I could trace the family connection for many of the graves. That was nearly sixty years ago.

And the cemetery tour we took with Nancy’s Dad a few times, visiting cemeteries in Rives Junction, in Michigan Center, on the edge of North Adams and Jonesville, and somewhere in the woods near Jerome. None of the graves were for those who died while in the military. None of the cemeteries are very big. Most of the graves we visited marked people who had been touched by the daily deaths that happened during that last year of the war in Europe.

No wonder it mattered to visit all the graves, to remember those we call “war dead” and everyone else, and to be quiet for a bit.

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These days, Memorial Day is a lot about sales and the unofficial beginning to summer. And odd conversations about whether we can now wear white shoes.

And so, some thoughts.

• Decoration and remembering at a particular cemetery can be helpful. But may not be.

• No one will be upset if you visit gravesites or if you don’t. (Actually, they might be. But you get to choose.)

• Reflecting on how much it hurt for all those moms and dads to get a telegram or a visit from an officer without immediately jumping to the value of the cause probably is wise. Because they still walked through, and were always marked by, the grief.

• Shop or don’t shop the sales.

• Statistics of death are abstractions of people. Previously living and breathing people. And in the abstraction, we forget the people and faces and stories. We can gloss over the grief.

• Maybe it’s good to be kind to people on Memorial Day, less dismissive of people for their views on various things, more aware that on Monday, people may be sad for reasons we don’t know.

• And since I’m working at the hospital on Sunday and Monday, please be careful. We’d rather not see you.

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Thanks for the comments I got last week to my question, When you go about supporting people in grief, what do you wish you had available to you?

I’m always open to comments.

And thanks for your support.

Jon