I was, without much actual attention, pondering that ancient question: “If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?” But then it suddenly shifted gears on me: “If something happens, but no one remembers, is it still real?
Is it still important?Does it still have meaning? Does it still matter?
I’m thinking no.
I suspect that we infuse meaning by the very act of remembering.
If something happens and we forget, if something happens and we fail to mark it in our memory, then its meaning is lost. It does not matter. It is, no longer, real.
Memories need mindful preservation. It is one reason we have monuments and ceremonies. It is why we have Memorial Day.
I know that Memorial Day brings to mind summer.
And appliances on sale. And used car ads decorated with waving American Flags. And BBQ’s, boats, hot dogs, “Pool’s Open!” signs, and a three-day weekend.
Most of us are out and about on this particular weekend. Most of us take work off, at some point touch a garden hose, and at some point eat something off a paper plate.
Midway through all this activity, the Sunday paper arrives, and in the middle of it is a picture of a reverent elderly solider, usually standing beside one or two much younger soldiers, all in uniform, caps in hand, praying over the grave of a fallen comrade.
Memorial Day isn’t just a day for living war veterans to take note of those who served with them and are gone. I’m guessing they take note of them on many more days than we could ever count. It is also a day for the rest of us to remember, recollect, and take notice of those who have died in the service of the United States.
There have been many wars. First, all of the wars as we were growing – the most famous of them is the Civil War. Then, a partial list includes World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Desert One, the Libya Conflict, the Invasion of Grenada, the Invasion of Panama, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq again.
I know he war in Iraq is a touchy subject and that many people are unhappy with how it all sits right now. It would fill missives and scrolls to take note of my own family’s debate on this one war, and volumes to record the public debate.
Perhaps recollection and memorializing of the war dead during a time of muddled and polarized public opinion on a current war is hard.
But, we must not equate the observance of Memorial Day with our positions on a current war. Tomorrow is not, in any way, connected with support of or protest against the war in Iraq.
Memorial Day is about honoring those who died in the service of our country. And we owe the dead that. We owe them our shared grief. We owe them our mindful and collective pause.
First we need to give voice to memories, and second, we need to mark them. The really important ones, the life-altering ones, the pivotal, weighty ones need to be marked again and again.
This is why, yearly, we remember those who have died. We pause and imagine them leaving, one by one, their homes, their loves, their lives behind them as they head into what can only be, in any still moment, terrifying: War.
And they didn’t come back. It is this we stop to remember. It is them we stop to remember. They were not trees that fell in a soundless forest.
One hundred and forty one years ago, during the Civil War, Walt Whitman wrote of them in Dirge for Two Veterans:
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
Tomorrow, we too can preserve them – by remembering.Some died in the 1800’s, many have died since, some will die today.Some will die tomorrow. Think of the ranks and files marching by and gone. Remember them. Pay them heed. They live through memory, voice-full and sounding.
