What are you doing this Memorial weekend to honor our fallen warriors? What abou

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   jackclee lmposted 8 years ago

   What are you doing this Memorial weekend to honor our fallen warriors? What about Google?
   
   A Memorial long weekend is the traditional kickoff to the summer season. What are you planning to do his weekend? Please take a moment to honor our fallen. While you are at it, please ask google and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple what they are planning?

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   FatFreddysCatposted 8 years ago

   My son and I will be marching in our town's Memorial Day parade with his Cub Scout pack.

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      jackclee lmposted 8 years agoin reply to this

      Good for you.

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   WordCrafter09posted 8 years ago

   I don't have any big plans other than maybe get together with a couple/few family members (if that much) but also to make the usual trip to the cemetery to put something on the grave shared by my two parents, neither of whom died in any war.
   
   My father had been a WWII Vet, as had my mother's twin brother (who, like my father, got to return home and have a life).  Before my parents married, however, my mother's first young husband had lost his life in WWII.  That may only been a very few people in my personal circle, but even with the limited and second-hand exposure I had a result of their being my parents, it was enough to gain appreciation for the day and to keep in mind that the experiences in my small family circle were magnified, both in severity and in numbers, so many times.
   
   As recently as within the last several years, and since my children and my sister's children have grown up, it hit me that if my mother's 24-year-old husband had lived not only would my siblings and I never have existed, but neither would my parents' grandchildren or great-children (many of whom one or another parents never got to see) would ever have existed either.  There was no particular joy or sadness in that realization - only the strangeness of a) realizing it, and b) sorting out things like the way life goes on for some, the way it doesn't, and the way the life and loss of someone I never knew could be so directly and indirectly tied to my very existence. 
   
   My mother died before there was an Internet, and there was only so much she'd ever shared about her first husband with us.  My father had shared either very little or "very peripheral" about his own WWII experience.
   
   Memorial Day is a day both of my parents took seriously.  The big thing my mother so often said was that Memorial Day is supposed to be a nice day, and people are supposed to have a nice holiday; but that it also has that serious, and in some/many instances, sad aspect to it.  She'd so often say that while people "aren't supposed to be sad all the time that day" it's a very different holiday than Independence Day ("when everyone is just celebrating and that's it").  Just about twenty years after my mother's death I still kind of cringe when I hear someone shooting off firecrackers on/for Memorial Day.
   
   Writing this, but also going to the cemetery to make sure there's a flag on my parents' grave may be pretty much all I do this year for Memorial Day
   
   There's what we do and what/whether we think.

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      jackclee lmposted 8 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for that touching personal story. I hope all young people here on Hubpages can read it and understand the significance of this day. I am disheartened when I see man in the street interviews of young people without a clue about our history.

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