Memorial Day is the orphan among American holidays. Even its name has changed: My father, a World War II veteran, called it Decoration Day, just as Veterans Day was Armistice Day. Today will be rightly claimed by veterans and their families, and by hawks and doves, and patriots of all stripes, exhibitionists and contemplatives. For many its significance will be less exalted – a three-day weekend, summer’s symbolic start, the day that will seem like yesterday on Labor Day. Memorial Day is orphaned, too, because it poses unseemly marketing dilemmas. We observe other holidays by buying something: presents, fireworks, turkeys, trick-or-treat candy. What does one buy for Memorial Day? A flag? Flowers for a grave?
When he returned to the United States in 1904 after 20 years in Europe, Henry James observed the distinctly American mingling of solemnity and informality, of democracy, when he visited Grant’s tomb, dedicated 12 years after the general’s death in 1885. In The American Scene, James contrasted it with Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides:
“The tabernacle of Grant's ashes stands there by the pleasure-drive, unguarded and unenclosed, the feature of the prospect and the property of the people, as open as an hotel or a railway-station to any coming and going, and as dedicated to the public use as builded things in America (when not mere closed churches) only can be.”
In The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg notes how “holidays that begin as legislative events embed themselves in our sense of the year’s natural order.” Memorial Day started in 1868 as a way to coordinate commemorations of the Union dead. Klinkenborg associates the holiday, as do I, with parades, always in the morning and always ending in a cemetery. Here’s Klinkenborg:
“To enter summer with an act of solemnity, however slight, however quickly dispelled by the long after noon that follows the parade, has a certain emotional fitness. It’s almost an apology for the thoughtless vitality of this season, a time when the naked exuberance of nature bears the living away into June and July and forgetfulness. Our job now is to live out all those summers that were lost to the men and women who died in wars past, as well as our own summers too. It’s no burden to do so.”
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Yesterday, I took my mother to visit my father's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. My thoughts returned to his burial on a hot, sultry July day almost two years ago. The ceremony was quite elaborate -- the casket borne on a horse-drawn caisson, a bugler playing 'Taps', nine-gun salute -- but I was struck by an odd, unexpected intimacy that excluded civilans, including the family. The eyes of the burial detail never left the casket, and their gloved hands carried it with an almost feminine gentleness; the ceremony was theirs, and we were simply spectators.
I remembered the sweat pouring off the faces and necks of the honor guard as they slowly and meticulously folded and unfolded the flag four times until it met the exacting standards of the officer in charge. He communicated his rejection and ultimate acceptance of their efforts with almost imperceptible movements of his head. My teenage daughter told me that she learned unforgetable lessons that day about respect, focus, persistence, and how much effort we owe certain kinds of work.
Finally, I remembered a car slowing to a stop as we prepared to leave the gravesite on the day of the burial. A stooped, rumpled Ted Kennedy, at the cemetery for the funeral of a constituent who died in Iraq, stepped out and spoke to us for a few minutes, thanking us for my father's service. Thank you, Senator Kennedy.
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