Wherever they are now, gone from this life, we should wonder if they can hear us.
We should wonder if they are asking if we have lingering, echoing doubts about why they are there on the other side of existence and did not get to stay here.
If no one is listening, we deprive ourselves of larger meanings to the Memorial Day we celebrate this weekend as we have for 154 years since it was invented by Civil War veterans as Decoration Day.
Somebody has to hear. Somebody should listen. No one is more necessary in this testimony than those who paid the price of admission.
But if you are gone – killed in wars allowed and promoted by your civic and literal parents – can you hear those still alive when they praise your valor, or is your gaze turned toward other matters? Indeed, should “celebrate” be what we do on Memorial Day, as if it’s like any other civic cheering – parades, parties and picnics all furled inside Old Glory?
But Memorial Day is unique and unlike any of its holiday cousins. Memorial Day is not the Fourth of July, Labor Day or Veterans Day, though we have mushed all civic celebrations into common mulch as we have done with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
This is our loss both as citizens and humans, because we ignore fundamental distinctions as if those distinctions don’t exist.
As for the 1.5 million soldiers who never came home, maybe they can see us and wonder what we are thinking. If they do peer from the other side, they might lament we have forgotten them. Illinois gave its share – 18,601 lives in WWII, 1,436 in Korea and 2,930 in Vietnam.
Of all the days we commemorate, Memorial Day is the saddest and hardest, and not only because those we honor this weekend are dead. It is a moment for honest, somber reflection.
You may believe that wherever our fallen soldiers are now, they do indeed hear your praise and value it; otherwise, you are only shouting into a deep canyon and awaiting the echo. I have never been sure anyone is there to listen.
But the day is about them, not us.
After 40 years of writing annually about Memorial Day, it now seems to me that writing to the living about why the day matters is more pointless than we should accept.
We seem unable to stop the instinct for choosing war. Maybe we like them too much as abstractions. We congratulate ourselves too much for our nobility. Plus, you cannot require people to be somber, even if they should be.
But at the moment we went to war – dozens of times as a nation – the wars all seemed necessary and even inevitable in the moment. We wrapped ourselves in that. Only history reveals how flawed that easy enthusiasm was.
The older you get, the more every soldier, every sailor, every airman, every Marine looks like a child to your sensibilities. Every soldier looks like your child in a starched and pressed military uniform.
When I see them walking the streets often in small groups on leave, my heart catches for an instant. They could be my children, my grandchildren. Yours, too.
But every one of them who perishes seems more pointlessly wasted than the last. I cannot stand at a child’s graveside and cheer how he or she came to be there. So I am a killjoy.
After all, we are the parents. They are our children, are they not? They will do what we ask, often joyfully. They always have and likely always will. We honor them for saying yes. But why do we ask when 1.5 million have not come home?
No one ever apologized. They never do. We never do.
We live on blithely. They become memories and ghosts. And worse, they are drafted into symbolism for our civic party.
If they come home alive, all we can do is offer that we’re glad for their survival and service. It should be thin ointment for our conscience.
The trade we impose is morally ambiguous. How do you fully embrace heroism if the reason for their deaths cannot withstand scrutiny?
In my fourth decade of writing about Memorial Day, I wish that we never again have to honor a soldier for dying. Do the bugles and patriotic banners intrude where our children are now?
And do they care, even if they can hear us? If they mock us for our empty piety, no one would blame them. With any luck, they are beyond all of those concerns now.
But if they could still hear, I have little to offer them beyond my apology for what we demanded of them. We demanded they suffer.
I’m sorry that all we offer now are parades, picnics and mattress sales.
I would tell the living, too, that they should stop allowing their children to be forged into weapons to fight for the indefensible. “Our soldiers died so we could be free.” That’s the chorus to the anthem we sing, without evidence that many of those deaths gave us anything substantial. How did the 50,000 we lost in Vietnam “save” our freedoms?
We are inspired and perhaps comforted in the boundless courage of those we send to fight, and we grant them a fierce salute for their nobility. They have earned that.
But we have let them die in many wars that were ignoble. Some of our wars were fed on greed – for power, money and land.
So Memorial Day does not only honor sacrifice and nobility, it’s a moment to say we’re sorry for not preventing the deaths of our own children.
And, yes, I will eat hotdogs from the grill, enjoy our town’s parade and salute the flag as it passes.
But I will put aside one moment to think privately of those lost and hope they do not judge us as harshly as we deserve.
We’re asking them to forgive us for not being better parents. They deserved better. If we are not sorry for that, we should be.