This Memorial Day will be different.
Rick Christ, MEP, CHEC
Preparedness Professional: planning, training, and exercises for all disciplines.
This Memorial Day will be different. There will be no parades, no politicians making speeches, no bands. Many will miss family gatherings and cookouts, lamenting what COVID has stolen from them.
Some, however, will observe this day as it was intended. They will visit a friend or family member or stranger who rests in a cemetery, who gave a piece, or all, of his or her life to defend their country from enemies, foreign or domestic.
Those brave, eternally dedicated sacrifices of our family are safe from COVID, and we are safe visiting them. The sun will polish their tombstones, the dew will water the grass that covers them, as it does every day.
Their sacrifice is not diminished by the lack of bands, or parades, or politicians making speeches. It is not diminished by our wearing a protective mask and maintaining a safe distance. In fact, they would be proud that their efforts to keep us safe are matched in small manner by our efforts to keep each other safe. Nor is their glory enhanced an iota by any arrogant defiance of recent rules that are set in place, as were these brave warriors, to defend us from harm. They rest comfortably, as they have through previous epidemics, and fires, and floods, and yet more wars, and the periods of our neglect in between those wars.
They lie there, silent definition of the duty and sacrifice that we are loathe to undertake. They remind us what suffering for our country really means. To them it was more profound than the inability to get their hair cut or colored, to shop and dine as they pleased. For many, their last meal was also “take-out” – out of a pouch or box or can dropped from a cargo plane.
So, go. Go alone, or in small groups. Wander quietly where, according to poet Theodore O'Hara,
"On Fame's eternal camping-ground their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round, the bivouac of the dead."
This Memorial Day will be different, for many of us. But it will be the same as it was, and as it always will be, to those we honor.