Whispers as delicate as violets now blossom in the greening cemeteries:
Do they remember? Are they too busy to dignify us with brief thoughts? In the awful boredom of death, must we suffer the ultimate agony of being forgotten?
And on this Memorial Day weekend, the answers from a fast-paced, self-absorbed society are as varied as the headstones where the violets grow.
This is certain: Memorial Day is getting old. It aches and limps, and it bows before time like an aging veteran. It has surrendered vigor for the high ground of historical reverence, and within the fading of its social focus may be its greatest success.
We live with the mind-numbing realization that wars have made us what we are, and while there may be an absurdity in the glorification of that, there can be no ambivalence in remembering those who were killed and maimed or those haunted by the bloody reality of having been there.
That assessment is immediately apparent in an examination of suburban attitudes.
On a recent evening in Naperville`s Du Page River Park, Bob O`Malley of Naperville sat on the high, grassy bank and looked down to where his son Jim played baseball.
”Sometimes when I see all the headstones in the military cemeteries,”
O`Malley said, ”I think that each one of them represents someone`s pride and joy and was their greatest hope, like Jim and the rest of my kids are to me. That makes you realize how dreadful war really is.
”I think there is a real danger in forgetting that. Some people feel that the Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. I don`t agree with that. It is terribly important to remember things like that, and I wish that more was done to keep Memorial Day like it was when I was a kid and everyone honored the veterans.”
Some things are still done, of course. There is a parade in Naperville, for example, and Bill and Laurie Cade, also watching a son, Kevin, play baseball, will be there this year to see their daughter Christy play the flute in the Elmwood Elementary School band, and when the cannons boom, Bill Cade will think about his uncles who fought in the war.
”As involved as we are in our own lives, we still remember,” Cade said. ”I think that is important.”
It is, of course, impossible to remember something you have never known, and so for the young, Memorial Day is different.
”Memorial Day is when my friends and I go out to the park in Mendota and have a big picnic,” said Katrina Van Werven, 22, a cashier at a convenience store in Oak Lawn. ”It is a time to party.”
At the Jack Rutledge auto dealership down the street, Bob Foley, 26, said, ”It means an extra day off so my wife, Maureen, and I head off on a trip.”
Nine-year-old Adam Stoklosa, stocking up on candy in an Oak Lawn store, said, ”It means that school is out, and that is a very big deal to me.”
And at The House of Pizza in Downers Grove, Steve Kolenko, Sean Barber and John Laukaitis, all in their early 20s, saw Memorial Day as the beginning of summer and good times.
But while they may focus on personal activities, everyone, no matter their age, knows that Memorial Day is intended to pay homage to those who died in the country`s wars.
”It is a more solemn holiday than some of the others,” said Stephanie Smith, a student at Naperville North High School. ”We have a picnic and do things that we enjoy, but I know that my grandfather was killed in World War II, and that makes the day kind of personal.”
”We have to explain to the younger people what Memorial Day is all about,” said George Schneeweiss at his Pizza King Inc. shop in New Lenox. ”I do not think it is hokey to believe in America and the flag. And even though Memorial Day is just another day of work for me, I realize the significance of it.
”My dad and uncle were in the second World War. They never talked about it much, but I respect them for what they did.”
Chuck Cunningham, 66, sat on a bench one morning in Crystal Lake and waited for his wife to finish at the hairdresser`s. He was with the Marines on Saipan in World War II, he said, and he wasn`t too good with a rifle so they put him in a mortar outfit.
”My brother John was killed in action in Italy,” Cunningham said. ”It just tore up my parents. My mother died at 49, and losing a son probably had something to do with her dying so young.
”You can never know what that kind of thing does to you until it happens. My wife and I lost an 18-year-old son in a traffic accident, and it is a very tough thing to handle. There is nothing more devastating than losing a child, and you just can`t put it out of your mind.”
Barb Farley, a waitress in Crystal Lake, has two sons in the Army. ”You just have to hope that there are no more wars,” she said. ”So many people have died in wars, and I`m afraid there will be many more.
”We had better keep Memorial Day around because we are going to need it. It is too bad that for so many people it is just part of a long weekend and they are too busy to remember what the day means.”
Remembering is not an option for some who would much rather forget. Robert Mazingo waited at a bus stop in Oak Lawn on a recent afternoon. A veteran of two years of search-and-destroy activity in Vietnam, he was on his way to visit his brother Ronald, who lost both legs and the use of one arm in Vietnam.
”Nobody remembers him,” Mazingo said. ”He gave everything for his country and he gets nothing. I don`t like Memorial Day. It used to be a day when people respected what people had done, but now you just get treated like crap.”
Mazingo said his wife was struck and killed in 1989 by a hit-and-run driver who was never identified.
”I`ve got a lot of things I don`t want to remember,” he said.
Richard Guenther, also a Vietnam veteran, is the building manager at the Homer Dahringer American Legion Post in Waukegan.
”It can take a long time to get on with your life after something like Vietnam,” he said. ”And it sure helps if you can feel that people support you.”
On Memorial Day, Guenther will get the sprawling legion club building ready for the luncheon that follows the parade and the ceremonies.
”We fill this place up for bingo every Sunday and we do wedding receptions and banquets,” Guenther said. ”Those things keep us going.”
Although the legion`s rolls show a membership of about 1,000, Guenther said that only 30 or 40 vets show up for the post`s meetings.
”There are only a few of us younger guys-I`m 45-and sometimes we look at each other and wonder how we are going to keep it going. It was really something at one time, wasn`t it?” Guenther said as he stood in the middle of the big formal meeting room and looked up at the long rows of photos of past commanders.
Fred Rathbun runs a sporting goods store, F and L Supply Inc., in New Lenox, and he also served in Vietnam. ”The way people feel makes a big difference,” he said.
”I know guys who did more than one tour in Vietnam because when they came home there was nothing for them and they didn`t like the way they got treated, so they went back.
”You can`t sit around and take freedom for granted. You have to be prepared to defend it, and a lot of people have done that over the years. It is very unfortunate that the youth of our society don`t take time to remember what Grandpa did, because it was very important.”
Down at the New Lenox Township Fire Department on Memorial Day, deputy chief Bob Fronek will sit by the telephone and hope that it doesn`t ring. If it doesn`t, he will have time to remember that his grandpa served in World War I and his father in World War II.
And, he said, he will probably reminisce about what Memorial Day was like when he was growing up and all the kids trimmed their bicycles with crepe paper for the parade in Joliet.
”It`s sure different now,” he said. ”Now it just seems more like the beginning of summer.”
Lois Downs, 78, who volunteers her time at the Christian Science reading room in Crystal Lake, leaned back from her desk and said, ”Memorial Day doesn`t seem to mean much anymore. Maybe people think that they are celebrating war and it gets tiresome to keep doing that over and over.
”War is such a horrible thing. Most of them are so pointless and over some trivial point, and they cost so much money and so many young lives.
”I guess men like war. From the time they are little boys, it is the male instinct to lash out. I know this, that if women were in charge there would be no wars, ever. Women would come up with a better way of solving problems.
”But it is a terrible thing to take out anti-war feelings on the young men that you have sent to fight. That caused so many Vietnam veterans so many problems. Maybe Memorial Day might better dwell less on the glory of serving the country and more on the horrors of war. That might make a better point.” The shouts of children on the Lakeview School playground drifted over into the Grayslake Cemetery on a cool spring day. Retired insurance man Charles Clow strolled among the headstones to survey the cleanup work that needed to be done before Memorial Day.
”There are a lot of old-timers buried here,” Clow said, looking at the leaves that needed to be raked and the stones that needed straightening.
Clow, a veteran of World War II in the South Pacific, is a past commander of the Grayslake Legion Post. The post sold its building 10 years ago and now, Clow said, the remaining members are getting too old to march in the Memorial Day parade.
”We tend to ride in the parade now,” he said with a grin. ”We have a good turnout here in the community, and I think that is a good thing. People should remember those who died in the wars.”
Up in a front corner of the cemetery, beneath the sprawling branches of an ancient oak, the Hendee family markers are clustered. Most of them have been there a long time, and one, for Cpl. Charles O. Hendee, says that he was a member of Co. K 134 Reg Ill. Volunteers and that he died Aug. 16, 1864, at the age of 19 years and 8 months.
The very first Memorial Days were to honor the Northern soldiers who died in the Civil War, young men like Hendee. And so before everyone runs off to picnic or play golf, it is perhaps fitting to return to beginnings and pause a moment to remember them all, from Charles O. Hendee, who never really had a life, to all of those who followed him on our behalf and were likewise cheated.
Without such homage, the haunting of those Memorial Day whispers will become intolerable.
