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Memorial Day
26 May 2025
A few years ago we ran into a family friend at her father's funeral. She charmingly introduced us to her children as "Mr. Mike," following the family custom for addressing adults.
She had become a teacher and told us how she had taken her class to the Catholic cemetery's military section to put flags on all the graves there for Memorial Day. And one for our father's grave as well.
Dad had lied about his age to join the Marines during World War II just in time to train for the invasion of Japan. Which, you may know, didn't happen because the atomic bomb made it unnecessary.
So Dad never saw action, the end of the war following soon after the bombings. And consequently he married Mom and then we came along. He lived a long life, dying at the age of 78, proud to know he was about to become a great grandfather.
Today, however, is about the fallen. Like Uncle Freddie, whose story we have told in past Memorial Day pieces.
Freddie did not live to be 78. He did not have great grandchildren. Or grandchildren or even children. Not even a wife.
After surviving Rommel in North Africa, the Sicily campaign and the invasion of Normandy, Freddie was killed on Periers Road during the brutal fight among the hedgerows for St. Lô on July 17, 1944. He was 24 years old.
We never knew him, of course, but we know how much he mattered to the people we cared about, themselves long gone now.
Their memory of him has become ours. And like they used to do, we salute him again on this day.
This may not, at the moment, be the country he was fighting for. But we are the people he was fighting for. The children of his nephews and nieces and cousins.
Who put American flags on the graves in the military section of the cemetery every Memorial Day.