Quo Vadis?

What does Memorial Day mean to you? Aside from being a long weekend, a break from work, an excuse to fire up the barbeque? That's not an idle question. Does Memorial Day mean anything to you, other than marking the start of Summer?

The pain of loss is always a constant companion, sometimes sharp, sometimes fading into a kind of background ache that over the years has, perhaps perversely, become a comforting warmth. To carry that pain is a part of the bargain going in, but something that, while you may appreciate it intellectually, you are never really prepared for. Emotional scars are the worst scars, for the physical may heal but the wounds dealt to the soul never do. A smell, a turn of phrase, a fragment of a song, and the memories come flooding back in a rush, an elephant kneeling on your chest in all his crushing weight.

I can never smell jet fuel again without being transported back to another time and place, without seeing one future closed off and another opened. Faces of the living and dead alike fade into an indistinct haze, yet there are moments in time perserved in startling clarity, as fresh and as urgent in the mind as the day they happened. Echoes of a past as immutable as the stone beneath our feet, you are left to wither and age while there are those who shall be forever young, forever cut off from your future and theirs. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and who can say who got the better end of that deal?

At some point you learn that the "peace" everyone else takes for granted is an illusion, a lie we tell ourselves to hide the fact that it is bought with blood. Orwell said it best, that we sleep peacefully in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf. And, never having fired a shot in anger, there are those who pass from this world to whatever comes next, if anything comes next other than the cold silence of the grave. Moments caught in time, where "No fair!" doesn't count and the saddest words in the world are "Why me?"

The hardest thing I've ever had to do is look into a widow's eyes and see reflected there the same question that torments me in the small hours of the night: why him and not you? Years pass and that question never loses its edge, an exquisitely sharp knife that strikes straight into the heart. There's that elephant again, demanding that, at the very least, you bear witness to what you are and to what those who are gone are not.

Someone once told me that it's not necessary to lose your soul in that job, but that a certain amount of violence will be done to it. And to some, it is only a job, while to others its something more, a calling verging on a religious faith. There are as many reasons for joining up as there are those who have joined, but there is one tradition that everyone shares: dying young. That, too, is an inescapable fact of life, the most vital of lotteries determined by the most random of chances. The winners get to go home and live with the questions and the guilt, and the losers, well, they get a white marble marker and a holiday.

There are those of us who don't need an arbitrary day on the calendar to remember; we remember every day, even as we carry on. There is an obligation we carry, to live the lives that they can not. But on this day in particular, that pain of loss is more urgent, more demanding, more accusatory. Large or small, everything you do matters, and the flip side of that obligation is to make the sacrifices of the past and present, both yours and theirs, worth the price.

So, what does Memorial Day mean to you?