Memorial Day in the US is a holiday to celebrate those who died in service to our country. That’s never how we celebrated it in my family. For my entire life, Memorial Day has meant traveling to cemeteries and bringing new flowers, tidying up the graves, things like that.
Growing up, that was my grandparents’ task. Now, my parents do it. Soon-ish, it might fall on me.
I use the day to remember people who have passed in my life, people who mattered to me, relatives who are no longer around. Plus, I remember and am thankful to those who served our country in whatever capacity, not just those who answered the call to arms.
But how I see memory and how I honor the past are very different than my relatives. How I view physical space is different. My family is mostly from Maine. I live in Massachusetts, but travel every few days. I don’t think of relatives as gravesites. I think of them as memories. I think of memories in places, like when I travel back to Augusta, Maine, where I’m from. I walked through a bunch of memories in the Old Port part of Portland last night, reminding myself of relatives and friends I’ve lost touch with along the way.
Are some of us set to see only the now and the tomorrow? Are some of us far less wrapped in their history, the first chapters of their story? What does it mean when you’re set in either direction (past or future)?
I look at the picture of my boy at the top of the post (a photo he shot of himself two days ago), and I see where he’s going and how far he’s come. In that, I can understand the importance of past on the essence of the now, and the tomorrow. But when I think about the longer stories of our genetics, of our woven memories, I seem much more preoccupied with what I’ll do to shuttle the loom than I do in understanding the weave of yesterday’s yarns.
To you, I wish a day of memory and thought.
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