Memorial Day 2008

This is largely a repeat from a post from a year ago, but with some updates.


When I was a child, I had a hard time understanding my mother's dedication to Decoration Day. We always went to the cemetery as a family that day while she placed flowers on the graves of her parents, brother and others. It wasn't until I lost my own parents, friends and siblings that I understood why she made sure they were all taken care of that day.

I don't spend the day at the cemetery placing flowers on everyone's grave, though. The best gesture I saw of something like that was few years ago, when my wife and her sisters visited their father's grave. He was a southern West Virginia mountain man, and he spent as much time as he could outdoors. One of my sisters-in-law picked some wild flowers along the road and laid on his grave.

That to me was more fitting to the man than buying an arrangement from a florist. A man who spent his life in the woods probably wouldn't appreciate greenhouse-grown flowers, but he would appreciate something from the woods themselves.

Too many people I know are in cemeteries now, including two of my best friends from high school.

My wife might tell me that some of these people aren't really gone. My daughter has a lot in common with my mother, even though they knew each other for only 15 months. My older son is a lot like his maternal grandfather and his maternal grandmother's father, both of whom are gone.

Nowadays I visit cemeteries where my relatives are buried, although I admit I don't know why. I do know there are many questions I want to ask. I go to my great-grandfather's grave and yearn to ask about the ferry he once operated on the Ohio River at Glenwood, W.Va. I want to ask my parents why they made some of the decisions they did, the ones that I was so angry at when I was younger but which I think I understand now.

And I wonder what happens when the flowers stop coming, when the deceased are pretty much forgotten or ignored, when no one cares to leave anything on their graves anymore.

Memorial Day is coming. I plan to do a couple of things differently this year. Mainly, it will be reminding my own family of the people who came before us so they know more about who they are and how they came to be.