Good morning! It is a lovely Memorial Day here in Louisville, I must say. But I don’t think I’ll be playing much in it. I have a whole lot to do in preparation for my family’s visit to Kentucky next week. I think I’ll end up spending most of the day in my pajamas, scrubbing down the bathroom floor. Isn’t that what holidays are for in the real world?

As most of you know, today is a time of remembrance for those who have died—kind of like Mexico’s Dia del Muerte, except not nearly as colorful. Actually, Memorial Day is martial in its origins. The first celebrations were held in the late 1860s to honor fallen Civil War soldiers. At that time, it was known as Decoration Day, because people decorated the graves of the soldiers (a tradition, I’ve noticed, still observed in the rural South—my great-grandparents’ graves have huge silk floral displays on them, year-round). The holiday expanded to encompass all those who had died in American wars following World War I, and Congress declared it a national holiday in 1971. Interestingly enough, I found that several Southern states have their own separate Memorial Day observances for Confederate soldiers.

But for many of us, Memorial Day isn’t about troops and soldiers. For my family and others, it is a time to remember all who have gone before us. Since my father died, our family has spent Memorial Day driving up and down the Wenatchee Valley to leave flowers at various gravesites. Some are for great-grandparents, others for relatives who died far too young. My grandparents all come up with us to see Dad, and to leave large flower pots with him (Grandpa Bruce actually came up with quite an ingenious way of nailing them into the ground so they wouldn’t tip over).

This might strike some people as a bit over-the-top, a damper on what most Americans consider a fun weekend off of work. Respectfully, I would disagree. We don’t spend enough time remembering the lives of those who are gone. Like our senior citizens, our society tends to push our dead off into the margins of the mind, to avoid facing our own mortality. Yet when it comes right down to it, wouldn’t we all like to be remembered by someone when our time comes?

I can’t put flowers at my father’s grave in Washington anymore. But I can take a small moment out of my fun weekend to remember him: his shy smile and quiet presence, the way he made salsa and deer jerky and strawberry jam “just because,” his insistence that we keep the lawn mowed. I remember the integrity with which he lived—when he died, no one could honestly recall him ever saying an unkind or spiteful thing to another person. He was always the first to help you move in or out of a new house, the peacemaker in a home full of stormy women. He wasn’t a saint (he did think it was funny to toss rocks at the cat and scare her). But he was one of the best people I’ve ever known.

“But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with God those who have died.” --1 Thessalonians 4:13-14

Kelsey