Remember . . . it's called Memorial Day for a reason!

More than a decade ago I was talking with Ted Gaess, a WWII Navy veteran, about his life. He was in his late eighties then, a member of the Church of the Good Shepherd who had spent most of his life in Fort Lee, and a wise mentor to a fairly new priest. He lived in Fort Lee, graduated from Columbia University in 1935, taught business classes at Fort Lee High School, and joined his father as a member and then Captain of Fort Lee Fire Company 4 (Ted’s son Peter would also eventually join the fire house). Ted married in 1939, his life in front of him.

Then the war came. Ted joined the Navy, was sent to the Officers’ Training School, taught Communications at the Naval School in Chicago, and shipped out from Brooklyn on the maiden voyage of the aircraft carrier Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ted came home after Japan surrendered, returned to his wife, had two children and an admirable career in business at Plastoid Wire and Cable. His life was blessed in many ways—he died alert and active, in his late nineties.

Yet as we were talking about his return from the war he stopped. “There were so many good men who didn’t come home.” The list of Columbia alumni was decimated—gaps and commemoration of those who gave their life for their country. There were gaps in the town too when boys didn’t come home. But Ted was mourning a different loss. “So many men who would have loved and cared for their families, so many contributions to make to the nation that would never be realized, so many good lives unlived.” I had an image of ripples of absences, of possibilities, of deep losses spread over time and space. 

It’s not “just” the cost of lives lost, immeasurable as that cost is. It’s also the cost of potential lives unlived, civic and economic and social capital never invested.  And the cost of the parts of life lost when veterans come home—the experiences that no one wants to hear, the trauma that limits emotional life, the aching knees and backs of those who parachuted into the jungles of Viet Nam again and again and again. We don’t see the caskets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we hear of problems in veterans’ health care delivery, in domestic violence among military families, of holes in hearts and minds that heal slowly and sometimes not completely.

In the week before Memorial Day, preparing for sales and picnics, remember as you go through your ordinary day how much richer our nation might have been if we had never had to send men and women to war. Rejoice in our hard won freedoms, visit the cemeteries, mourn the losses of the living and the dead, and work for justice, freedom, and peace so that we don’t have to lose “so many good men [and women!]”.