EDITORIALS

A silence that says all

On this memorial day, remember the living, too

Community volunteers place flags in front of 4,800 headstones last year at the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery in Sherwood in preparation for Memorial Day ceremonies.
Community volunteers place flags in front of 4,800 headstones last year at the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery in Sherwood in preparation for Memorial Day ceremonies.

THEY ARE beyond it all now, the dead. They are beyond all the empty words-even beyond the slow, mournful sound of Taps. They are beyond the sweat and muck and blood. They are beyond the pain and death, the blood and pus, the anguish spoken and unspoken, the horror first anticipated and then recalled. They are beyond all hurting, too, thank God.

They are beyond all of that now, they who went down to the sea in ships and found themselves in peril. They are beyond the acrid smoke and shattering explosions. They are gone now, the cannoneers who scarcely knew their guns before they were blown apart.

They have passed through it all now-the heart-stopping fear, the calm courage and wild rage, the sorrow and pity. And yes, they are beyond the ineffable sweetness of life, too. They have passed beyond all that. They have passed. And we stand at their graves with something like awe, that they should have given so much for us. It is still true: Greater love hath no man.

We remember them today for our sake, not theirs. The annual rites, the little flags fluttering in the breeze, the unseemly expressions of vainglory (“We are the greatest nation that ever was!”) that smudge the scene here and there . . . . All of this ceremony is for us the living, those of us who feel we must do something, say something, feel something, anything today. For decency’s sake. For gratitude’s sake. So we pause this May morning and rest under the shade of the trees, thinking of those who have already crossed their river.

Far away from today’s battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, at an uneasy remove, we taste the fragile peace of home and listen to the forgetful wind whistling over their graves. This will be the first year some fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, will have to stand at a still fresh grave on Memorial Day, knowing it will not be their last there and wondering how they will bear it. They should know that many mourn with them, and pray God grant them the balm of time.

GRIEF NEVER ends but it does blend into our being and become a part of us, flowing always within us like an undertow, inseparable from what we are. We wouldn’t know what to do if we were to awake one morning and it was gone. We would no longer be whole, we would no longer be ourselves, part of all that we have encountered-and all that has encountered us. We come almost to cherish our grief, like an old friend and teacher. Grief may not heal, but it ripens into something else, something like understanding. In the words of Alan Tate’s ode to the Confederate dead:

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

To the seasonal eternity of death . . . .

How restful those lines are now, as restful as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” But there is more to poetry than that one definition of it. There is another kind of poetry, the kind that shatters tranquillity, that explodes the heart. Like Randall Jarrell’s jagged, razor-sharp lines on

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

For the generations to come who might be unacquainted with the technology of earlier wars, the poet-a veteran of what was then the Army Air Corps-wrote an explanatory note not without a stark prose-poetry of its own:

“A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.”

God forgive us.

That is Memorial Day, too. That is war, too-man’s oldest game, instinct and perversion. Do not turn away, but look. Stare. This is the price of our forgetful freedom.

There is nothing we can do for the dead now, but there is much we can do for the living. We can ask where our wounded and convalescent are, and how they are faring. We can see that they and their families are cared for. And when they are stacked in hospitals like so much cord wood, or put out of our sight like something indecent, we can demand more than a few showy dismissals of those who were supposed to have been in charge. We can demand decency.

We can ask, we can demand to know, what is being done for those who have given so much. Where are they now? For people do not live in some abstract realm-like the past or in politicians’ speeches or newspaper editorials or on the television screen-but in the here and very now. In hospital waiting rooms. In veterans’ homes. Such places should not be kept out of sight, or reserved for special occasions. Or Memorial Day.

TODAY is also a day for family picnics and block parties, for good times as well as solemn rituals, a day to make the most of. This day deserves to be enjoyed. For this set-aside day mixes joy and sorrow, grief and pride. Let us not exclude thoughts of the living from this day. Life is to be celebrated even as we remember the dead.

Memorial Day is also made for laughter and leisure. Laughter is a better memorial than tears. For it is the ordinary sounds-of children at play, of families uniting, of old stories retold-that are the best memorials.

It is the ordinary joys of freedom that generations sacrificed to assure. So that Americans can walk the way we do-upright, free, unafraid, even blessedly unaware. So that we can stand up for what we believe and say what we think. So that any man can look his boss in the eye, or his congressman or president, and tell any of them to go straight to Hell. And any woman do the same.

It’s America. We can strike roots where we are or light out for the territories. Our choice. It’s a free country still, a big country, and-don’t be fooled or dismayed by a transient season or trend-all of it is still the land of opportunity. It’s a whole, big country out there still beckoning. And we live in one of its most beautiful, varied states.

This is still the land where freedom grows. Tall and straight. This is freedom’s native soil, its natural habitat. Here it thrives. But not, as this day reminds, without sacrifice.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 05/27/2013

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