Memorial Day Thoughts

A collaboration between Lewis McLain & AI

Memorial Day arrives this year on Monday, the 25th — the last Monday of May, where federal law has fixed it since the Uniform Monday Holiday Act took effect in 1971. For most of us the day will mean a long weekend, a grill, a sale on something we didn’t plan to buy. None of that is shameful. But it’s worth pausing, before the burgers, on what the day was made to carry. Here are a few thoughts.

Where It Came From

The holiday was not handed down from on high; it grew up out of grief. In the years after the Civil War — the deadliest war in our history, with more American dead than every other conflict combined for a long stretch afterward — communities North and South began the slow ritual of decorating soldiers’ graves with flowers each spring. They called it Decoration Day.

There is no clean origin story, and that’s part of the beauty of it. More than two dozen towns claim to have started the tradition. Waterloo, New York holds the official federal designation as birthplace, awarded in 1966. But one of the earliest and most moving observances came in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, when newly freed Black residents reburied Union prisoners who had died in a Confederate camp and held a service over the graves — the people with the least power in that society insisting that the dead be honored properly.

General John Logan, commanding the Union veterans’ organization, formalized May 30 as a national day of remembrance in 1868. The grass-roots act of laying flowers became, over a century, a federal Monday holiday. Something is gained in that — a whole nation pausing together. Something is also lost, and we’ll come back to that.

Three Days We Keep Confusing

A small clarification that matters more than it sounds. We have three distinct days, and Americans blur them constantly:

Memorial Day honors those who died in military service. It is, properly, a day of mourning.

Veterans Day (November 11) honors all who have served — the living especially.

Armed Forces Day (the third Saturday in May) honors those serving right now.

The distinction isn’t pedantry. To thank a living veteran “for your sacrifice” on Memorial Day is a kind, well-meant error that quietly misses the point. Memorial Day is not about the ones who came home. It is about the ones who didn’t, and about the families whose chairs stayed empty. Getting that right is itself a form of respect.

The Name Behind the Number

Here is where remembrance gets concrete, and where I find the day most piercing. National casualty totals are so large they go numb on us — more than fifty-eight thousand names cut into black granite in Washington, a figure the mind files away without feeling. You must go. You must touch the wall to know what I mean. Every one of those names had an address, a hometown, a graduating class. One of them was my classmate.

Jerry Wayne Fraze and I graduated together from R. L. Turner High School in Carrollton, the Class of 1965. So did our friend Carl Hargrove. It is not that we were buddies, but we shared the same space and attended the graduation ceremony – the last time forever that a senior group will ever been in the same place at the same time. Jerry had been born in McKinney in 1947, and his family had lived in Farmers Branch since 1950 — so without anyone planning it, his short life touched three of the towns I’ve spent my career working in. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1966, barely a year out of Turner. On March 12, 1968, Corporal Fraze was killed in Quang Tri Province, serving with the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines. He was twenty-one years old. He is buried at Restland Memorial Park, and his name is cut into Panel 44E, Line 26 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

I can still place him in the halls at Turner. That is the thing a casualty number can never hold: before he was a statistic, Jerry was a boy we knew — a locker, a yearbook photo, a whole life that was supposed to happen and didn’t. Carl, who had played ball with Jerry at Turner, left a remembrance on his memorial page years later. He recalled the wild, ordinary good times of their high school days, and then this: “Almost 50 years later it still saddens me to know that I made it home and you did not.” He signed it simply, Your Friend, Carl. That is what this day is for. Not the abstraction — the locker, the name, the friend who came home, and the one who didn’t.

A community is, among other things, the keeping of names like Jerry’s — a ledger of debts that can never be repaid and must never be forgotten.

A town also keeps this memory in its budget, quietly — in the upkeep of cemeteries, the maintenance of monuments, the small line items for a veterans’ service or a wreath. We don’t usually think of remembrance as something with a cost of service. But a city that tends its war graves is spending, year after year, on people who can no longer vote, complain, or say thank you. That may be one of the truest things a government ever does with money.

Linda also had a classmate to be remembered, Bruce Thomas King. I am sure there are others who lost their lives that we are not aware of. We remember the times as if they were yesterday. Almost as sad as losing one of our own are the ones who came back not the same. You know exactly the ones I’m talking about. But these are just two who did not come back at all for which we remember this day.

“Greater Love Hath No Man”

The verse reaches for itself every Memorial Day: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). It belongs on the day. But it deserves more care than the greeting-card use it usually gets. It was used in our church service this morning.

When Jesus says it, He is speaking on the eve of His own death, to His disciples, about a love that gives itself away — and a few breaths later He will be arrested. The laying-down-of-life He means is first of all His own, a sacrificial death for the undeserving. It is not, in its origin, a battlefield image at all.

And yet the verse is not wrongly applied to the soldier. The men and women who throws themselves on the grenade, who holds the line so others can fall back, who does not come home so that someone else’s children will — they are living out something real about that love, even if they never read the verse. Scripture honors such self-giving. We should too.

What we should resist is the slide from honoring sacrifice to glorifying the thing that required it. War is not glorious; it is, very often, the wages of human greed and evil, and the soldiers we bury on Memorial Day are frequently its victims as much as its heroes. The Christian can hold both truths at once: deep gratitude for the one who laid down his life, and deep grief that the world is the kind of place that asked him to. To mourn well is not to pretend the death was beautiful. It is to insist that the love behind it was.

A Day That Forgot Itself

Which brings us to the harder thought. Somewhere along the way, a day of mourning became the unofficial first weekend of summer. The flag at half-staff until noon now flies over a parking lot full of holiday-sale traffic. I don’t say this to scold. But it’s worth asking whether a mattress sale and a war grave can really share the same afternoon without one crowding out the other?

The old observance had a built-in seriousness because it was tactile: you went to the cemetery, you knelt in the grass, you put flowers on a stone with a name you knew. The federal Monday holiday gave us a shared national pause but also a kind of abstraction. It is easy to “observe” a thing you don’t have to touch.

So perhaps the most counter-cultural thing a person can do this Monday is small and old-fashioned. Find a grave. Learn one name. Tell a child whose it was. Fly the flag correctly — half-staff till noon, then raised to full. Pause at 3:00 p.m. for the National Moment of Remembrance, which almost no one remembers to keep. The day does not ask much of us. It asks only that we not let the ones who gave everything slip quietly out of our memory while we’re distracted by the long weekend they made possible.

That’s the whole point of decorating a grave. It says: you are not forgotten. It is the least, and nearly the most, the living can do. This Monday, I’ll be saying it to Jerry and Bruce.

BTW, there is a plaque honoring Jerry in the Collin County Courts Building. Also, on our 50th RL Turner Anniversary, a large group of us visited the high school. We were pleased to see a large display honoring Jerry at the very entrance. LFM