Sylvia's Journal

Memorial Day was one of those perfect 10+ days. We followed our usual Memorial Day routine but missed some of the festivities, like the wreath-throwing into Manchester Harbor because we had a bit of a late start; thus, instead of biking downtown we drove, parked the car and then walked across town past the very old cemetery where at least one person lies buried who was born in Amsterdam over a hundred years ago. There might be more Amsterdammers but most of the headstones are too weathered to read or broken.

We sat through the usual Memorial Day routine, including a rambling speech by one of the local clergy and the loud noises of the gun shots that salute the dead. This is a practice I don’t get. If it was through gun shots that most of these people perished, why honor them with what killed them?

Memorial Day in the US is very different from memorial day (Dodenherdenking) in Holland, which happens on May 4, the day before Liberation Day (of WWII). All day the flags would be half-mast and in the evening there would be a silent march, along a dark and tree-lined avenue to the enormous granite social-realist statue of a woman, gazing up (or down) with her arms crossed over her chest. (She still stands guard at the end of the lane at the beginning of a park, amidst enormous beech trees. When my mother died, now 10 years ago, we all walked over to this same statue, this granite mother of all mothers, and laid the flowers that had been sent to us at her feet.)

The 4th of May ‘march of remembrance’ would end with local notables laying a large wreath at the statue and 1 minute of silence. For many years, I would stand among dozens of fellow girl and boy scouts along the route, in uniform, holding a (real) torch while the townsfolk walked silently by. It was a somber ritual that was very meaningful to my parents’ generation, whose losses were, in the late 50s and early 60s still very raw.

For me the day was also my kid brother’s birthday and thus meant cake and decorations and a party where I, as the next older sister (but the youngest of the rest of the bunch), could play the role of older sibling and organizer of the games – and the next day, Liberation Day, was always off.

After the morning memorial ritual we went back home and spent the rest of the day reading, me Samantha Power about Saddam’s treatment of the Kurds and Axel about Rory Stewarts’s walk across Afghanistan. We ended the beautiful day with a cookout on the beach and the final plantings. We have never been this ready for the growing season, which officially started yesterday.