Remembering the Dead

Here's another perspective on Memorial Day that I found on Donklephant; I include the first two paragraphs but the whole piece is worth reading:

Memorial Day began not in one place but in many. Hilltop cemeteries across the North, behind old stone churches and meetings, with long views across the farms. On the grass where fathers and mothers — the ones who could find the corpse among the slain — laid their boys.

After the war, everyone wanted to forget. Was there ever a war everyone didn’t want to forget after it ended? But in the springtime the veterans, still boys themselves in ‘66 or ‘67, walked up the hill to the graves of their buddies and remembered. As a later generation of veterans walked to a long black wall in a gash in the earth in Washington, D.C., and remembered.

A friend of mine who lived all over the Midwest and South when he was young said that rural families often had picnics on old family cemeteries. The family cemeteries were often in a pretty spot on a hill surrounded by trees and were excellent places for a picnic and remembrance.