I joined the military later in life. I was 37 years old when I went to my Officer Basic Course at Fort Lee, Virginia. I was 38 when I climbed into the back of a C-130 Hercules to fly into Iraq to begin my deployment with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment at the height of the surge in 2007. I started that deployment with the conventional rhythms of civilian life thoroughly imprinted in my mind and heart.
Service in a war zone was a jolting experience in countless ways, but nothing prepared me for the shock of death. It’s not just the sheer extent of the casualties—one man, then another, then another, and three more—all cut down in the prime of life. It’s the unnatural inability to truly mourn their loss.
Back home, when a family member or friend dies—or even a friend of a friend—there’s a collective and often community-wide pause. Depending on your relationship to the deceased, you’re able to simply stop, to grieve or to share in the grief of others, to try to help bear another person’s burden. There’s a ritual that matters, and it’s a ritual that—ideally—helps a person begin to heal.
At war, however, there is the shock of loss and the immediate and overriding need to focus, to do your job. In fact, the shock of loss typically occurs exactly when the need to focus is at its greatest. At the point of the explosion—or the site of the ambush—there’s a fight for life itself. On the ground and in the air, there’s the symphony of rescue and response. In the relative safety of the TOC (tactical operations center), there’s an urgent need not just to understand but also to direct the fight.
And then, even when that fight’s over, no one stops. The only pause is for the “hero flight”—the helicopter mission that takes your fallen brother home. You stand, you salute in silence, and then you focus again.
Yes, there are short memorial services, often days later, but nothing about it feels right. Your soul screams for the need to grieve, but your mind answers: Grief is a distraction, and if you’re distracted then your mistakes can cause only more grief. So the cycle moves on, remorselessly. Death, shock, focus. Death, shock, focus.
It’s a cliché of course to say it, but I never appreciated Memorial Day until I had brothers to remember. I was home on a midtour leave on Memorial Day Weekend in 2008. We’d already taken too many casualties, and I’d had no time to grieve. I was still pushing the grief back. I still had to focus. I wanted to enjoy my time with my wife and kids, and to truly treasure that time, I had to hold back. They couldn’t see what I truly felt.
Then, the dam broke. My son was watching a NASCAR race and before the race started, they played Amazing Grace on the bagpipes, and I just lost it. I had to leave the room. It was too much. But that’s also when I saw the value of this day. It gives us back that pause that we lost. It gives us back that ritual we need. Memorial Day, properly understood, helps us heal.
As much as it’s a holiday reserved for remembering those lost in war, Memorial Day has lessons for the crisis of the moment. Memorial Day in 2020 is a day of grief happening in the midst of a season of grief. Today, in all likelihood, COVID-19 will claim its 100,000th American life. That’s 100,000 souls in roughly 10 short weeks. Even worse, for families and communities, there has been something deeply unnatural about the cycle of loss and mourning.
Sick family members have been whisked away, never to be seen again. Countless thousands have died alone, rather than surrounded by the people they love. Without true wakes, visitations, and funerals, communities have been unable to come together to lift each other’s burdens. There’s an old proverb (the internet says it’s of Swedish origin) that goes like this—“Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half-sorrow.” In our season of grief, all too many Americans haven’t been able to share their sorrow.
As the country slowly begins to confront the sheer enormity of its loss, we should learn from the power of Memorial Day. When we can gather again—when we can comfort our neighbors in person—remember not just who they lost but what they lost. They lost a ritual of grief that can never be restored. In the months and years to come, however, we can pause for them—we can pause with them—and give them the moments they need to help them heal.
Photograph of a memorial to coronavirus victims in Brooklyn by Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images.
Thank you David. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your thoughts. Thank you for sharing them. I pray that I am not remiss in writing a bit more about this day and the honoring of those who have preceded us in death. I was a young Marine with orders to Vietnam when I learned through a telephone call that my father had died in Congo at the too-early age of 48, continents and a life-time away. It would be a war and four decades later when I visited his broken tomb-stone grave lying under the tall elephant grasses of northern Congo's savannah. This morning from the Amazon of Peru I watched with tears the ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, "known but to God", tears streaming down my face. I am reminded of the day I stood at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., reading some of the 58,000 names of those who gave their lives to defend and extend the freedoms with which we are blessed, freedoms that are seemingly increasingly at risk.
And I grieve. But like you, David, I am also a Christian and an evangelical at that. I am also reminded that when Jesus said to his disciples that "Greater love has no man than this, that he lays down his life for his friends" he was speaking about his own soon-to-be-death, what I believe as a life-time student of the Scriptures, was his battle with the final enemy of us all: Death. I have faced it too many times since my father's death, during thirty years as a pastor speaking at the funerals of friends and family members, but especially at the funeral of my first wife, twenty years ago. Grief. It is a divine reminder that we are made for relationships, that we have loved and have been loved. It is the natural and normal human response to the loss of someone close to us. The Scriptures neither disparage nor discourage our grieving. To the contrary, grief invites us into the presence of those who suffer deeply the loss and pain of separation.
However, as the Scriptures also say, "we do not want you…to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope. [For] we believe that Jesus died and rose again…." Hope became my watchword. When she was ill, after treatment had faded, I had been invited to Burundi, in the throes of civil war and ethnic genocide for seven years; hundreds of thousands at died at the hands of their neighbors, hundreds of thousands more were displaced from their homes. After visiting an internal displacement camp, people filled with despair, stomachs emptied by hunger and hearts overwhelmed by hopelessness, I visited a church on the outskirts of Bujumbura, the capital. As we came close I could hear the sound of singing, a chorus hauntingly melodic, indescribably sweet. It seemed as though the very skies had opened and the choirs of heaven were singing, a thing of beauty in a place of darkness. I stepped inside the church, light streaming through open windows and the cross cut out above the door. A thousand people had gathered, their voices lifted to heaven, every hand outstretched, every heart and voice raised in songs of prayer.
Hope. There are moments in life – sometimes merely an instant, other times more measured – when the barrier between time and eternity, between earth and heaven, is breached. On one side of that moment our dying friend is with us still, on the other side they are absent, their absence is palpable. Their body lies in front of us, but it is merely a body, absent the person we love. We care for this body, treat it with respect – as was done at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – for it was the dwelling place of one we loved. As the apostle wrote: For the believer, "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord", the One who laid down his life for his friends. Grieving is not just about sadness and tears, not just about being alone or silent, not just about memories and familiarity. Grieving is about discovery and meaning. It is learning how to live with truth and in truth. It is about finding the healing power of a deeper kind of joy. It is about faith, and it is about learning the pathways of hope.
May we live each day as Memorial Day.
Our paths may never have crossed, but we were in the same theater around the same time. Because we did convoy escort, we were directly affected by the surge. If I may, I'd like to share my Memorial Day remembrance (https://www.facebook.com/vaughn.larson.7/videos/2344350948919488/)
Barack Obama wore a remembrance bracelet for one of the Soldiers in that video when he campaigned in 2008. Because we live in a small world, I deployed with that fallen Soldier's father in 2008-09.