Reflections of Memorial Day

I stood in the cemetery, looking at the stones with the different names on them, spotting familiar last names that brought up persons whom had been distant memories.  There were flags on the graves of those who had served in the military.  There were flowers on the more recent ones, and down at the other end were grave markers from the 1800s.  I saw years that indicated long life and years that indicated only a few months.  Of course, the one place that is special to my wife is the large stone that reads “Weaver.”  This is where her grandparents are buried.  This is where, each year on Memorial Day her aunt sets up her music stand and plays her trumpet to songs like “Yankee Doodle” and “America the Beautiful” among other selections.  I watch as others bring flowers and gather around graves…Lee; McCombie; Coble; some more Weavers, among others. 

This year, for the first time, I attended a Memorial Day service featuring “Taps” and a message by a retired minister about the importance of remembering.  He told a brief history of Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it has been designated in the past, and then moved on to remind us of the sacrifices of soldiers and their families. He touched on the Vietnam Days and those who didn’t support the war…or the soldiers…and how that trend is thankfully changing…slowly, but it is changing.  

My mind wandered a bit as he told stories, and I went to Joshua 3 where the Israelites crossed the Jordan River and they were commanded to place rocks at the place where they crossed as a memorial to God’s action.  This happens in several Old Testament stories, and it made me wonder if that is where we get the notion of headstones in our cemeteries.  So, a quick search…

These graves were usually marked with rough stones, rocks, or wood, apparently, as a way to keep the dead from rising.  (Ok...I thought this line was funny!) 

They were mostly marked with the deceased’s name, age, and year of death. Gradually, churchyard burials evolved involving large, square-shaped tombstones prepared from slate (1650-1900) or sandstone (1650-1890). The inscriptions carved on slate used to be shallow yet readable.

Public cemeteries evolved in the 19th century. Eventually, people started giving importance to the gravestones, headstones, footstones, etc. as a means to memorialize the dead. (https://www.iscga.org/history-of-gravestones.html)

Interestingly enough, gravestones can be traced back to ancient civilizations like Egypt, and that could also explain the use of them as memorials by Israel.  But what I thought about was not just gravestones, but remembering and how I am trained to look forward and not backwards.  We don’t do much remembering or reminiscing do we?   

Here I stood in the cemetery and I began to think about my own family, my grandfather who served in the Navy.  I remembered, and as I did I started to tear up, longing for just one more conversation with those who in my childhood seemed so large and so wonderful.  In that graveyard was the story of our families…and it is the same with all of us.  It is a shame that we don’t take the time to ponder, reflect, and tear-up from time to time.  Or once a year, just because we get the day off to do it.  I have heard it said among Christian circles that the person is on there anyway, so why visit?  Well, maybe visiting a graveyard isn’t supposed to benefit the dead, but to benefit us who are living.  Maybe when we see the larger story of life, we have a better understanding of the unfolding larger story, and not just the moment.  
At one point, we started talking with my mother-in-law and came to the realization that the place we were standing were actually the plots that my wife and I own…we were standing in the place of our burial.  That was sobering!  Shocking really…and I joked that I wanted to make sure the view was nice!  WOW…awkward moment.  

It made me wonder who might come and visit my headstone one day.  I wonder what the name “Woodall” will mean to those who visit the cemetery and who will plant the flowers and decorate my grave, because my life meant something to them.  You see, the day before my daughter and her grandmother went to put flowers on the family graves, and her artistic flare could be seen…her presence definitely known.  I’m all about having a good time, enjoying family and friends, and having a great meal—but we must also learn to remember in a sobering and weighty manner that places our lives in the context of larger “Life.”  If you haven’t visited a cemetery that matters to you in a while, my homework or challenge for you is to go there and sit by a headstone and remember for a few moments.  

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” ― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

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