~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Memorial Day, hurrah! It used to be one of my favorite holidays because the whole family would travel around the area visiting graveyards to wipe down gravestones and place fresh flowers and take a moment to remember the dead. More importantly to children, it was significant as school ending at last and endless summer beginning, more important to kids than the dead and buried.
What was called Decoration Day after the Civil War, on May 30, 1868, made official to honor the dead of the war by decorating their graves, a hundred years later, in 1968, morphed into a different name: Memorial Day was made official, along with the awkward-sounding bill, The Uniform Monday Holiday Act. This made Memorial Day and the Presidents holiday occur on a Monday to give workers a three-day weekend.
It sounds oxymoronic to write that visiting graves was fun, but it was a freedom of a kind because we were outdoors just about whenever we wanted to be, not just at recess and before and after school. Even with the sun shining amid showers, a common morning event on Decoration Day, running free from school and knowing summer was as good as here made us loose-limbed and a little wild. Mom said we couldn’t sit on the gravestones, walk on the graves, shout or yell. But while the adults were pulling weeds and bedecking tombstones not just of relatives who died in war but of any family member dead, we got to run at will. It was a gigantic, overpowering feeling of being let go of – we were spinning in our own freedom. All in one day, we decorated and ran wild in the cemeteries of Scranton and Perry, interment for all our deceased. We children honored them by saying “Hi!” to each familiar name and running on not stepping on gravestones or graves.
Things changed – we were in the marching band as majorettes and twirlers, leading our horn-playing, drum-beating followers through puddles on the way to Jefferson Cemetery . . . and then on to picnics with our friends and boyfriends. We no longer went with our parents to their grandparents’ graves because we were busy.
Eventually we grew up to assume these duties, kids of our own running wild among graves. And as an adult every place I visit or vacation in, I look for cemeteries, hoping to walk through them, reading names and dates, saddened by newborns with headstones and no names, gladdened by the romantic (“When first he did me beguile, me thinks it was his smile”) and funny ones (“He fed the squirrels”).
The whole idea of acres of the dead is archaic; but honoring those who have lived, whether a good or bad life, I feel an equally archaic urge to honor their humanity, perhaps hoping that relatives on down the line will do so for me.
