Riding my bike on Memorial Day

Riding my bike on Memorial Day I passed many cemeteries dressed for the day. Spruced up. All the old flowers gone, the lawns cut, the gravestones cleared of debris. Ready to receive visitors.

That’s how we used to spend Memorial Day as a kid, visiting my grandmother’s grave in Kentucky—and a few others that I could not understand who they were in our lineage.

The tradition started as a way to honor those fallen in past wars. Growing up World War II was still somewhat fresh. That was a good war. The Vietnam conflict, never properly recognized as a war, was complicated. We didn’t have any family that had died in war. Dad was a Navy veteran and my mother’s brother had also enlisted and a few other uncles who had married Mom’s sisters. Again, we didn’t need to honor them because they were still alive.

Anyway, while visiting grandma’s grave—a person, by the way, that I didn’t feel a great connection with as she had passed when I was a toddler—I would explore the graveyard and read the names and ages on neighboring stones. The headstones with little lambs on top represented a child. Even as an elementary schoolchild I had a real sense of mortality: This could have been me. If I’d had typhoid, if there weren’t medicines, emergency rooms, etc. If I’d lived when there wasn’t penicillin or proper hygiene or fluoride for teeth.

Sort of where the current director of the CDC wants to take us.

Back to.

Lives hung by a thin thread and conspiracy theories proliferated nut because of social media but town gossip. That the Swedes were bringing in disease, that the Norwegians or Slavs brought cholera and not the bad water or polluted well everyone was drinking from or spreading because of contact/germs.

Again, we’re sort of back to those days. Except the spread of misinformation is so much more pervasive. Nothing spreads faster than a lie while the harder truth, science, can get buried.

Touring the graveyard brought all this home to me as a kid. Even if I didn’t feel grateful at the time—I knew I was better off than those children dearly loved, dearly departed, eternally mourned, forever dead.