LAUREL COUNTY, Ky. — When you take the memory out of memorial it’s just another day off work.  Holidays are set aside for a reason, not for your personal cause.

I drove home for the Memorial Day holiday weekend to spend some much needed time with family.  Also to fill the void in the hearts of my empty nester parents, along with the vacant bedroom.  My mother has a way of inching hints at me day by day to insist that it’s time to pay a visit.

Visits home are highlighted by lots of coffee consumption and watching an evening family movie.  We chose the awe-inspiring film War Horse, mainly because we are all animal lovers and horses are especially my favorite.  The movie seemed to be like any other horse movie — Black Beauty, Seabiscuit, and Secretariat — until war was thrown into the mix.

It wasn’t the horse’s relationship with soldiers and other horses that jerked my tears, it was the humble soldiers going through the motions of war.  There’s a reason soldiers congregate after hard-fought foreign wars — they have a connection.  Their emotions and experiences cannot be matched by others who have not undergone the battle of life and death caused by unnecessary hostility.

As I sat upon my grandparent’s old leather couch, I was hoping for another one of my grandfather’s intriguing war stories in light of the holiday.  Meanwhile, out-of-town family members scurried about in the kitchen, sat lazily in the living room glued to the television and my sister and cousin played a card game at the dining room table.  I realized his silence wasn’t voluntary after several minutes — he had fallen asleep, and he slept most of the day.

We had no memorial of his service in World War II, and no one paid much attention that he was napping most of the day.  Everyone had their own agenda, including me who was scheduled to photograph friends later in the evening.  In disappointment of the non-memorial activities, I waited until he awoke to hug him ‘bye.’  

His face lit up and pulled me in for a gripping hug around my waist and said, “this is grandpa’s little girl,” and it just about brought tears to my eyes.  Memories began to flood my mind of he and I sitting in silence alone in the house as he would carefully await the perfect moment to abruptly break the silence with his narrative of when the Germans bombed their Thanksgiving dinner.  Or when he chauffeured officers and generals around to plan attacks and the fate that awaited them with mortars when he dropped them off for only a moment.

When veterans open up their memories to you, it’s not to be dismissed as a past event that they need to talk about.  It’s something they want to share with you, and it may never be repeated it again.  Each war experience is told with a heavy heart and it takes patience and listening to memorialize it.

Families should put down the remote, burgers and get out of the pool on Memorial Day, because you can’t memorialize in the future if you can’t remember the past.



mmccrarey@sentinel-echo.com