What Memorial Day is not

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What Memorial Day is not

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, May 25, 2009

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The bugle echoes shrill and sweet,
But not of war it sings to-day.
The road is rhythmic with the feet
Of men-at-arms who come to pray.

— Joyce Kilmer, “Memorial Day”

Memorial Day is not the official beginning of summer. Not the day the pools open. Not a long weekend off work, with barbecue in the back yard. Not a day for visiting the beach, or shopping giant sales on furniture, appliances, linens, clothing, cars. Not the day you can start wearing white shoes again.

It is a national day of mourning, of tending graves and remembering those who rest there.

“Decoration Day” had already been practiced for some years when General John Logan proclaimed it a holiday in 1868. Then, it was for remembering and tending the graves of soldiers who fell during the Civil War, “whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land,” Logan wrote.

Logan’s General Order No. 11 set out May 30 as Decoration Day. Over the years, Decoration Day became Memorial Day, and got shifted to “the last Monday of May,” in order to insure a three-day federal holiday.

And there were more wars, and more war dead. Millions, now.

Memorial Day wasn’t designated as a day to remember all the dead. It is specifically for remembering those who gave their lives in military service.

It’s a huge distinction: Those we honor today are not the aged loved ones who slipped from us despite all efforts to keep them. They are not the ones wrenched from us too soon by disease. They aren’t hapless victims upon whom violence, accidental or deliberate, fell without warning.

They are the men and women who went to do a job – a hard job – knowing they might never be back. In some cases, probably, guessing they wouldn’t.

All of them were somebody’s sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, lovers and friends. All of them everyday worries, and everyday jobs, and everyday hopes, that were interrupted.

They went anyway.

Today at 3 p.m. (local time, no matter where you are), a bugle will play “Taps.” You may hear it, you may not.

Stop anyway, and remember.