'For Grief and Lost Belief'

In the U.S., Memorial Day is observed on the final Monday in May – this year, May 27. Formerly called Decoration Day, it started after the Civil War as commemoration of the nation’s war dead. The meaning and observance of holidays tend to dilute with time. When I was a boy, the school year didn’t end until about a week into June, so Memorial Day was a preview of the coming summer vacation.

 

In the morning we would walk to the parade, where each kid was given a small American flag on a stick. The parade was predictable and exciting – marching bands, Marines in dress blues carrying flags and rifles, beauty pageant winners on a flatbed truck, city officials waving from convertibles, and members of civic and fraternal organizations, some wearing fezzes or campaign hats, shambling in unmilitary fashion. We stood on the curb, waved our flags and joined the end of the parade as it marched to the cemetery. There, the Marines fired their rifles after a brief ceremony, we sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and went home.

 

I haven’t been to such a parade in more than half a century. Today I remember the holiday’s purpose privately, especially now that my middle son is a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps. It’s a day off, a long weekend, I can sleep in. No picnics or parades. My observance isn’t much better than John Cheever’s as recorded in his Journals (1991), in the first entry in the section titled “The Sixties”:

 

“Memorial Day. A new notebook. A man wearing a powdered wig and a tricorner carries a bass drum past the liquor store. I do not take my younger son to the parade, as I would have done two years ago. I have grown this old, not to say jumpy. Taking Ben to see ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ I think of X, who, suffering from melancholy, walked through the city looking for moving pictures that dealt with cruel and sudden death, torture, earthquakes, floods, and assassinations—with any human misery that would, briefly, make his own burdens seem lighter.”

 

The meaning of Memorial Day and much else is lost in the journal entry. Cheever joined the Army in 1942 and served in the Signal Corps in Astoria, Queens. By the Sixties he was profoundly alcoholic. Perhaps we can forgive him. R.L. Barth was a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War and has become its poet laureate. In “Why We Fight” (Simonides in Vietnam: And Other Epigrams, 1990) he writes:

 

“We fight for no

Slant domino,

Ragged-ass flag,

Or body-bag;

Say, rather, for

Buddies—but more,

Even, for grief

And lost belief.”