A deep respect

McKenna Snow
Class of 2024

(5/2021) Memorial Day for me has never been experienced through large town events, or even neighborhood events. Instead, I’ve always experienced it through my own family. I’ve grown up in a military family my entire life. I have moved all about the South, and even up in Maryland for a while, so my "familiarity" with my town and local community shifted all the time growing up.

I never connected that closely with my town in terms of celebrating holidays like these. I don’t recall really going out to some kind of gathering on Memorial Day, hosted by a local group or church. Maybe I never looked all that hard for these events, but the reality is I just never was quite connected enough to know of these Memorial Day celebrations and gatherings that are apparently common.

Instead, for me, Memorial Day is usually pretty quiet. We never invited people over to hangout for the day. Pre-retirement from the military, my dad always had Memorial Day off. Wouldn’t a lot of people like to seize this day off as some fun holiday to invite people over, to enjoy the day, treat it like a mini Fourth-of-July? That’s what I’ve heard about how other people celebrate Memorial Day.

Perhaps in other circles, that is how this day is treated. But in my family circle, it is quiet, like I said. We usually spend the day outside, gardening and cleaning up reflectively, and then we have dinner as a family.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for patriotic get-togethers that celebrate American freedom and the men who have fought to keep our country safe. They deserve to be celebrated, and patriotism is something worth throwing parties for.

But this day isn’t a mini Fourth-of-July. It’s not an alternative Veterans’ day. This day is Memorial Day. This day is a memorial for men who have died serving our country. The focus is less on the freedom we enjoy in the present because of this great sacrifice, and more on the men who made the sacrifice in the first place. Grilling hotdogs and hamburgers never really seemed to do that justice for my family. So instead, it is quiet.

Hence, my family never was about that kind of overtly joyful celebrating on Memorial Day. It just never quite seemed right. I speculate that it is because we grew up with a more intimate connection to those in the occupation that Memorial Day typically commemorates.

I watched my dad deploy multiple times growing up. He would leave for about a year at a time. Technology in the early 2000’s was still in its formative stages, not nearly as refined as we have it today, which means communication with my dad, who was far overseas, was a big challenge. Skype calls were fuzzy, hard to hear, with poor connection. Phone calls were hard to hear and text messages were sent infrequently due to the demanding, all-time-consuming nature of his job. One particular year, my dad didn’t have access to really any technology at all to reach out, and I recall my mom saying she had to handle, on her own, homeschooling five young children, and waiting in patient, but painful silence as she hoped to hear of the safety of her husband. He was able to give her updates once every couple of months, totaling about five times over the span of a year, letting her know he was safe. My mother handled this stress gracefully, making sure her children felt secure and safe, and taught that God was the greatest source of comfort in times like these. She took us to weekly Adoration, to sit with the Lord in silence, because He would wait with us for our dad. He would support my mom in times like these, when her little kids were missing their dad, and waiting for him to come back. And when we were blessed enough to have our dad return safely, He celebrated with us. He was there throughout all these deployments, walking both with my dad, and my mom, though thousands of miles apart.

But my dad didn’t always return home with everyone he left with. Some soldiers didn’t come back. Some families didn’t get to share the joy that my family did in seeing their dad walking to them in the airport after being gone for a year.

Memorial Day isn’t for us to celebrate people like my dad. My dad has Veterans’ Day to be celebrated. Memorial Day is for the soldiers who didn’t come home. The ones who said goodbye to their families before deployment, and who didn’t get to say hello again.

My dad has been friends with those soldiers. My mom has been an active leader in the Family Readiness Groups that support women whose husbands deploy, and helps carry the weight of life without them around. The connections my family has grown up with, knowing these families by name and the soldiers lost, have made me view Memorial Day differently. That is why Memorial Day, to my family, is quiet. Burgers and throwing parties isn’t what this day calls for. We remember, in quiet reverence, the brave soldiers who fought and died for our country. They deserve that kind of respect. They deserve the Memorial Day that’s been designated on the calendar for them.

Let the veterans have their Veterans’ Day, and let all the patriots share in the Fourth of July. That’s who those holidays are for. But let Memorial Day be different. Reach out to those military families you might know, and see how they celebrate Memorial Day, and how it might be celebrated differently by them. If you haven’t been moving as much as I have, and you’re more deeply engrained in your local community, try to learn the names of those soldiers from your town who have served.

Let Memorial Day be more than an excuse to invite people over and grill burgers. Let it be respectful, commemorative, and prayerful, honoring those who died serving their country, their local communities, and their families. Those men are brave individuals who heroically gave their lives for American freedom, and deserved to be honored as such.