Saturday morning, as we entered the Memorial Day weekend, a passage from a book of Quaker wisdom caught my eye. It was about joy and wonder, and it helped me prepare for the ceremonies ahead.
Memorial Day is not my favorite
holiday. Like so many others, its
conversion to a celebration of American consumption patterns, away from its
true purpose, irks me. But its true
purpose is also a challenge. I have yet to learn to honor my war dead, which
includes the brother born 17 months behind me, the curly redhead second child, the
first son. The twenty-one years he spent
on this planet made my life both complicated and complete. His departure ended all grievances I might
have held against him, but, more than I knew at the time, it left me alone.
His death was the result of some poor
choices he made, including getting his girlfriend pregnant. But the daughter that was born to him and the
girlfriend who’d become his wife, made him a proud father for more than a
year. The sight of that baby tucked into
his arm like a prize is one I’ll never forget.
His death in Viet Nam was like a
hand grenade thrown into the family’s center.
I had already left for college and marriage, starting my adult life. He’d left for basic training and the
opportunity to fly in helicopters. We two older ones left behind a younger
brother, sister, and two parents whose marriage was wearing thin. Less than two years after he died that
household had split in two, the younger kids dangling separately from the
edges. You might think the passage of 45
years would erase or soften that memory, but it has not.
Despite his premature death, my
brother is the only one of us to carry the family into the future. That baby, my niece, has gone on to make two
babies of her own; her firstborn daughter has made my niece a grandmother
twice. It’s a story many families have,
but it’s one I’ve somehow ignored until recently when my niece began actively
introducing her beautiful family into the ragged remnants of her father’s
tribe.
It was my amazing niece who came to mind when I read this passage from Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity (2001), a book I still read daily:
“Something
seen, something heard, something felt, flashes upon one with a bright
freshness, and the heart, tired or sick or sad or merely indifferent, stirs and
lifts in answer. Different things do it
for different people, but the result is the same: that fleeting instant when we lose ourselves
in joy and wonder. It is minor because
it is slight and so soon gone; it is an ecstasy because there is an impersonal
quality in the vivid thrust of happiness we feel, and because the stir lingers
in the memory.” Elizabeth Gray
Vining, 1942
Joy and wonder. I had that those fleeting instants while watching
my niece weave the two halves of her family together. I saw that her way of being in the world,
which is so like my brother’s and yet is her own, is the one intimate
experience I have of the eternal, and of grace.
I offer this story in case anyone else suffers on Memorial Day. Press on.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a not-so-gifted writer who has much to be grateful for. You can send your Memorial Day thoughts to
her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.
Thanks to Joe Mohnike for his war stories this week, and for coming back
alive.
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