
Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, to mark Memorial Day, former Marine Elliot Ackerman reflects on a letter written by a soldier who never came home. His words remind us of the best way to honor the dead.
Of all American holidays, Memorial Day is beset by the most contradictions. Officially, it is a somber holiday, one where we honor our country’s war dead, but it is also the holiday that marks the unofficial beginning of summer. Over this long weekend, many of us will pull out our barbecues, or travel to our local beach, or check out the latest blockbuster. I grew up in a religious household and, for me, Memorial Day weekend meant it was the one Sunday I didn’t have to go to church; the Indy 500 was on, and I was allowed to watch the race with my dad.
Then I joined the Marines, and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that, Memorial Day took on a different, more specific meaning for me. In the early years, I’d spend the day visiting the graves of friends buried at Arlington.
Many Americans don’t have any personal ties to our war dead, and so the remembrance part of Memorial Day is, for them, an abstraction. The first-ever Memorial Day was anything but abstract. It was celebrated in 1868, three years after the Civil War, a national bloodletting that killed one out of every 50 Americans. Back then, everyone knew someone lost in the war. The original idea was simple: The day would be used to decorate the graves of the fallen. It was proposed by John Logan, a retired Union officer, who understood how important it was to the dead that they not be forgotten. The truth is, anyone who has fought in a war, and had the good fortune to survive, understands this—because all of us have imagined our own deaths.