c. 1997 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Memorial Day was originally called”Decoration Day”and was first observed May 30, 1869, by order of Gen. John Alexander Logan for the purpose of decorating the graves of the Civil War dead. It is traditionally celebrated by parades, speeches and the decorating of graves with flowers and flags.
Drew Gilpin Faust, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says the federal reburial program of identifying and burying individual soldiers in marked graves in national cemeteries was an unprecedented action for the United States and the world.
It was the Northerners, she writes in a recent issue of”The Chronicle of Higher Education,”who”argued passionately that the assumptions of American democracy for which the war was being fought required the Union government to care for and memorialize each slain body, something no government had done before.” The Confederate dead were not included in this program, she says. Instead,”privately funded organizations across the South”helped bury their dead soldiers in a similar manner.
The way cultures manage death, Faust also writes, reveals their”fundamental values and assumptions.” Speeches, such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; rituals of mourning, such as the city-wide procession at the Richmond funeral of Stonewall Jackson; and cultural artifacts such as coffins, tombstones, songs and sermons, symbolically reveal the spiritual and emotional meanings of the Civil War’s carnage and its implications for the country, she says.
While rituals memorializing the war dead can help a country make sense out of war’s chaos, it is just as important for individuals to find personal ways of commemorating a family member who sacrificed his or her life for the country.
To lose a loved one to war, says Ira Byock, president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine,”is an abrupt loss for the whole family that carries forward into the future. That person becomes a part of the history of the family, hopefully to be honored.” Yet, he says, how the veteran is remembered may differ among family members who”may project their own ideas and images onto that person they remember _ or maybe never even met.” To help build a tradition of memorializing one lost to war, Byock recommends simply telling their stories.”The stories families tell,”he says,”are the glue that holds families together across generations.” And what of the dying veteran who has not come to peace with his wartime activities? Byock, who has helped many through the dying process, says,”None of us dies in perfection. We’re just human beings. I would ask that person to extend the same degree of mercy to themselves, that they would extend to another person who was suffering and felt remorse at the things they had done _ to just have some mercy toward themselves.” MJP END RNS
