Memorial Day

One of the first emails I received this morning was from my cousin Valerie with a copy of my Uncle Harry's obituary.  Harry was the only brother of my mother Marge and her mother Shirley and he died in World War 2. 

Of course, I never met him.  Looking back, I was not as curious as a child or young adult as I am now about who Harry was.  In our email exchange this morning, my brothers, cousins and I discuss how he was called "Two beers" (couldn't drink more than that?) and aspired to being a friend to everyone he met and was beloved by everyone he crossed paths with.. Most importantly maybe was he was my mother's big brother and my grandmother's only son.

Over the years I do think about and wonder about Harry on Memorial Day.  The wondering is how his death affected his sisters and parents and what difference that made in their lives.  Were they changed by this terrible event in their lives?  And would my life - and my siblings and cousins lives - have been different in any way if he had not died so young?  What I wonder is what happens as the   tapestry of our lives is lived out and one of the threads is broken.  How does it change the design?

Usually on Memorial Day, I ponder the effects of war, but this morning I wonder about the effects of death itself.  Especially in the midst of a global pandemic.  Yesterday the Sunday New York times front page was a listing of thousands of people who died from the virus.  It included their names and then some little fact about them.  Here are some examples:

Patricial Dowd, 57, San Jose, Calif, auditor in silicon Valley
Marion Krueger, 85, Kirkland Wash.  great grandmother with an easy laugh
Jermaine Ferro, 77, Lee County Fla. wife with little time to enjoy a new marriage
Cornelius Lawyer, 84, Believue, Wash.  Sharecropper's son
Loretta Mendoza Dionisio 68, Los Angeles, cancer survivor born in the Phillipines
Jordan Driver Haynes, 27, Cedar Rapids Iowa, generous young man with a delightful grin

This is the first six - of literally thousands.  It is overwhelming to read through them and very, very sad. These people are gone and their families are affected and will be changed by their loss, irrevocably - as I have been changed by the loss of my husband and my mother, surely, by the death of her beloved brother.

So, on this Memorial Day we remember and walk through the valley of the shadow of death and ponder the great mystery of life - that it ends and we are left behind to put our lives together without our loved one.   There is much I don't understand - but this part I trust - that God is with us in our grief and guiding us into new life.  A different life that we may not have planned but a new life that brings hope and eventually joy.

So, my prayers are with those who remember and mourn today - the men and women who sacrificed by answering the call of their country to serve as well as the many victims of this corona virus.  Actually, I pray for all of us who are mourning still the loss of significant people in our lives.

Here is a reading that seems fitting for these musings.  It was read at Chuck's celebration of life

After Reading about the Death

It is the work of the living to grieve the dead.  It is our work to wonder  how else the story  could have gone. It is our work to weep and worry, and it is our work to heal.  The clouds hide the moon, hide the sun, Sometimes for days.  We don’t believe it will be forever.  Some part of us knows not only hope, but patience. It is the work of the living to love even deeper in the face of death, to know ourselves as flowers on the pathway, easily crushed.  The world crushes. Some stems spring back, some never rise again. We know we must be resilient, but resilience has wings and sometimes flies away. It is the work of the living to, against all odds, grow wings. It is our work to live— and work it sometimes is. It is our work to show up again and again and again,  Genies who refuse to go back in the bottle, lovers who ever insist on love, stems that feel sunlight and, though we can’t yet move, let it encourage our being.