Kimberly Emerson

This weekend, the nation observed Memorial Day.  Most of my friends posted something on Facebook about honoring those who died in service.  I saw many emotional photographs – the Vietnam War memorial, the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, an unnamed military cemetery – all with the same caption: “For all those of you who thought this was National BBQ Day.”

I looked at this slogan and had myself a long think.

Really, I try not to do that a whole lot.  Excessive thinking seldom brings me anything good.  No thinking, of course, leads to disaster.  It’s a difficult tightrope to walk each day, especially for one who has trouble balancing on two size ten feet and some solid ground.  (Hence why I do most of my thinking sitting down.)  But in this case, I deemed it necessary.

There are lots of stories about how Memorial Day started.  According to the website usmemorialday.org, at least twenty-four different cities claim that they began the tradition of a day of recognition.  Most notably, one story credits an organization of women in the South with laying wreaths on the graves of Confederate soldiers who died in the civil war.  Think about it: those soldiers were fighting for a way of life which included, among other things, the right to own other people.

While I vehemently disagree with the politics of the Confederacy, I don’t begrudge those women the right to mourn their dead.  War is a great equalizer that way – no matter whether the soldier involved is on the right side of history or the wrong, someone will still be devastated when he is gone.  Someone, somewhere, will still feel that the world will never be right-side up without her.

In fact, the first official Memorial Day was observed on May 30, 1868, and involved the laying of wreaths on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers alike.  The message couldn’t have been clearer.  We were still one country, and all of the dead were ours, no matter which uniform they wore.  (The Southern states refused to recognize the day, and didn’t have ceremonies on the last Monday of May until after World War I, when the day changed from honoring the dead of the Civil War to  remembering Americans who died in any war.  Several of them still have a separate day to honor the Confederate dead.)

I spent Memorial Day on my own, doing a little remembering, a little writing, a little movie-watching, and a little too much eating.   (Ice cream, not barbecue – although after all this talk, I want barbecue.  A lot.)  I thought about the friends I have in the military, the people who’ve lost loved ones, and about my own loved ones who’ve died without being in any kind of war (or, like in the case of my friend Carmen who died of breast cancer, wars of a different sort).  I thought about my dad, who was in the army long before I was born.  Lucky for me, he came back, or I wouldn’t be sitting here typing at all.

I’ve read the arguments about how America has become too casual about Memorial Day, and that’s probably true.  Commemorative rituals help us to keep perspective not only on the freedoms we enjoy, but also on the problems with which we deal every day.  When you put them up against fighting for the right not to be owned by anyone else, they seem pretty small indeed.

There was a lot of talk about what exactly constituted the right way to spend the day.  Attend a remembrance service?  Go to a military cemetery?  (It seemed a bit invasive for me, since I don’t actually know any of the people who are buried there and I can’t afford flowers for all of them, but maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at it.)  Perhaps, to paraphrase my brother, we can stop getting into wars that don’t involve our own borders?

At the end of the day, I have to wonder – maybe sitting down with the people we love and sharing a meal of…oh, say, barbecue, might actually be a good way of honoring our heroes after all.  We live in a world where we are free to sit and eat with friends of all colors of the rainbow, without looking for enemies on the horizon, because people were willing to die to make it so.  It’s good to enjoy time with people we love, and if we remember all that went into making our tranquility possible, maybe we’ll be a little less likely to argue over who gets the bigger piece of chicken.

I hope all the fallen soldiers rest in peace, knowing that we do remember.  And I hope there’s barbecue in Heaven.

Kimberly prays with all her heart that humanity finds a better way of solving its problems, so that no family ever has to sacrifice a loved one to war ever again.

Tags: barbecue, Civil War, Confederacy, Memorial Day, military, Union