Growing up, our family remembered not just war dead and deceased veterans on this day, but also other people whom we had loved and lost. And those our grandparents wanted to remember. Like the Aunt who brought Great Grandma across the Atlantic when she was a motherless infant, with a goat to provide her with milk. It was a time to take precious peonies and lilacs from the garden to the cemeteries, and some years, the first of the roses. Mom called yesterday to tell me about the family's grave decorating trip over the weekend, coordinated by a thoughtful daughter-in-law. It's a nice way to remember those who have gone before us, I think.
It wasn't until I got a little older that I really understood that the day was really meant primarily to honor lost warriors. Peggy Noonan writes about fame in America, the behavior of heroes and why we tend to forget them. Via Maggie's Farm, Victor Davis Hanson's moving 2002 essay on some of the men who fought with his father's cousin, the man after whom he was named, in Okinawa:
. . . I also know that America has never quite produced a generation like those Marines who went up Sugar Loaf Hill — educated, idealistic, and as dangerous in war as they were benevolent in peace. Now in their eighties, their letters and voices seem strangely tranquil and with astuteness of a distant age that will not return, so at odds with the cacophony of the present. So on this Memorial Day and once more in a time of war, we Americans must be duly conscious of who they were, what they did, and how we must try to preserve and be worthy of what at great cost they have passed on.Read the whole thing. Please.
One of the things those Marines (and many more like them) helped preserve was the culture of the delightful couple in the video linked here, of about the same vintage as the Marines. So fun to watch.
Update: Do not stand at my grave and weep. Makes me weep.
