Memorial Day

Although our Memorial Day weekend was filled with lots of yard work, Sean and I felt very strongly that we should do something to honor our dead this year.  It seems like the past several years we have spaced the whole “memorial” part of Memorial Day and it has simply been an extra day at home.  So this year, after spending the morning in the yard, we walked/rode bikes down to a nearby cemetery and spent some time visiting grave stones.

Djeryd was keenly interested in markers that included military titles and service information.

 

The weather was crazy.  It poured and then the sun came out to warm us up and dry us out, then it would start raining again.  I loved watched my sons share this experience together, as buddies.  They were constatnly calling out to one another to come over and see some little tidbit of information they found in their wanderings.                

Admittedly, the stones that touched me the most were not those of our servicemen, but those of babies.  Perhaps that is because I am a mother and while babies are physically near and dear to me right now, sons who are soldiers have not entered my life as yet.  I hope they never will, but in this day and age, I feel that is hoping in vain.  We came across one grave that marked a life lit and extinguished in one sorrowful day – exactly 17 days after Alyxandria was born.  And I could not help but weep for that mother who was burying her newborn baby at the same moment I was holding mine in my arms.

I think the thing I came away with at the end of the day was that while both of grandfathers served in and survived World War II, I was not at their gravesides.  I wanted to be visiting their graves on Memorial Day - not the graves of strangers, but of my loved ones.  I want my children to know their heritage and that while their grandfather and great-grandfathers did not give up their lives in service to their country, they did offer their lives and served honorably.  It was a wonderful day.  And next year my children  will visit their great-grandfather’s grave.  And we will honor him as we should.  I only wish both of my grandfathers were buried closer together, instead of hundreds of miles apart, so we wouldn’t have to take turns.