It was an ordinary Thursday morning, a few days before Memorial Day – before the holiday shopping sales, patriotic speeches and backyard barbecues. Rush-hour commuters streamed down U.S. 285 from Conifer and then slowed as a series of traffic lights switched from green to red.
Near apartment complexes, lilac hedges were blooming in purple and white, persuading a passerby to stop and smell the blossoms that bobbed in the breeze. I took the turnoff to Fort Logan National Cemetery, a road that climbs a hill and passes row after row of distant gravestones that look like gleaming white buoys on a green sea of grass.
In 1868, Gen. John Alexander Logan designated May 30 as a day for “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.” Known as Decoration Day until 1971, Memorial Day is now celebrated on the fourth Monday of May, ensuring a three-day weekend of relaxation but little thought to its true purpose.. The one day that Americans had dedicated to the remembrance of the men and women who had perished in the Civil War, the first and second World Wars, the Korean War, Vietnam, and now Iraq has vanished.
I wish to resurrect a childhood Memorial Day tradition, the act of quiet remembrance beside the graves of strangers. I see myself climbing into our family car for the yearly drive to the Old Soldiers Home, a stark brick building that housed aging and indigent soldiers. We’d walk among the graves, some overgrown with weeds, the headstones skewed, the etched names unreadable. I was the flower girl; it was my job to place lilacs picked from our huge backyard shrub on these long-forgotten sunken mounds. Then, we would stand in silence before walking on to the next abandoned grave.
For many years, time and anti-war sentiments dulled the meaning of Memorial Day for me. Throughout history, Americans have been divided about the necessity of war, from the American Revolution to the conflict in Iraq. And now I wonder if it makes any difference to these dead soldiers whether I believe in the reasons for a particular war? In the end, impassioned arguments do not matter to these individuals cut down by bayonets, bullets or bombs.
Just for that one day, I choose to bury the politics of war and mourn the lives lost in Iraq while I have continued to live my life far away from the horrors of roadside explosions, car bombs and sporadic sniper fire.
I parked and followed the Memorial Path to a small lake edged with weeping willows and oak trees. I heard three-volley rifle reports, the sad sounds of the conclusion of yet another burial. Behind the low hills are sections of the cemetery with newer graves from 2003 to 2006, where a few Coloradans who fought in Iraq may rest among other veterans. I thought about these individuals who now are silent and at peace, distanced from turmoil and strife. For their mourning families, every day – even the most ordinary day – is one of unimaginable loss and heartache.
As I walked among the newer graves, storm clouds roiled toward me. Jagged lightning ripped the darkening sky, and a thundering wave of sound engulfed me. Then it spread beyond the cars crawling toward a burial site, beyond the gentle hills, beyond the traffic on South Sheridan Boulevard.
I turned away from the graves and quickened my steps back to my car, thinking about a memorial to the 2,462 men and women – and still counting – who have died in Iraq. I imagined a darkened auditorium with a large movie screen filled with images of the dead as they were in life, joyful as children, hopeful as teenagers and committed as soldiers.
If I allotted 60 seconds to each, this montage memorial would take more than 40 hours to complete, an average Monday-through-Friday work week. It would take five days of my life to watch this memorial; it took all of their lives to make it.
The tribute can start on any Monday at 8 a.m. and continue only during work hours until the last face fades away late on a Friday. And then, the auditorium will go dark. Until a new image graces the screen, followed by the next … and the next. Until the deaths in Iraq end.
Marilyn Flanigan can be reached at marilyn.flanigan@gmail.com.
