This memorial day

Remember the living, too

Monday, May 26, 2014

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, then recalled. They are beyond even the heroism and courage of men at war, which we rightly celebrate today, and poets since Virgil have exalted. Of arms and the man I sing . . . .

They are beyond all of that now, those who went down to the sea in ships and found themselves in peril on the sea. They are beyond the acrid smoke and shattering explosions, 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 of it all. And, yes, they are beyond the ineffable sweetness of life, too. They have passed beyond all that. And we stand at their graves with something like awe, that they should have given us so much.

We remember them today for our sake, not theirs. The annual rites, the little flags fluttering in the breeze, the expressions of vainglory that here and there smudge the scene . . . . All of this is for us, those of us who feel we must do something, feel something, today. For decency's sake. For gratitude's sake.

So we pause today and rest under the shade of the trees, thinking of those who have already crossed their river.

Away from today's battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, at an uneasy remove, we taste the fragile peace of home, hear of war and rumors of war, sense the world coming apart again, and listen to the forgetful wind whistling over graves.

Ceremoniously we mourn, personally we feel. For grief never ends. Day by day it blends into our being, and becomes part of us, 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. 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, while the world goes on all around us. Allen Tate wrote of it in his 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 tranquility." But they cannot mask the shattering horror of war, man's oldest game, instinct and perversion. Do not turn away from it, 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 VA hospitals like so much cordwood, or put out of our sight like something indecent, or kept on waiting lists so long they die before receiving treatment, we can demand more than a few showy dismissals of those who were supposed to have been in charge. We can demand more than congressional investigations and heads on a platter.

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? What is being done for them and theirs? And we mean what is being done for them now. For people do not live in some abstract realm--like the past or in politicians' speeches or on the television screen--but in the here and very now. In hospital wards and 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 memorial.

It is the ordinary joys of freedom that generations sacrificed to assure for us. 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 and tell him to go to Hell. And any woman do the same. So we can strike roots where we are or light out for the territories. It's a free country still.

It's a 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. This is its native soil, its natural habitat. It thrives here. But not, as this day reminds, without sacrifice.

Editorial on 05/26/2014