‘I can’t do this life without you’
The ways in which we memorialize the dead, privately and collectively
In the aftermath of the Uvalde shootings a year ago, there was a phrase I couldn’t get out of my head.
The mother of Amerie Jo Garza, the first of the victims to be buried, had posted a photo of her on Twitter with these words: “Mommy needs you Amerie. I can’t do this life without you.”
I can’t do this life without you.
The death of a child is a parent’s nightmare. It rattles the order of things, breaks the heart into shattered pieces. For every mother who finds a way to move on, despite or because of the devastating loss, there are those who become shells of their former selves. I knew someone like that, a woman on a steady diet of antidepressants and tranquilizers after her son crashed his car into a wall. She was gorgeous, in an Elizabeth Taylor kind of way. But even her makeup could not mask the vacant look in her eyes whenever I saw her at some family gathering though she did manage a smile.
Parents lose sons and daughters in war, too, and too often it’s little consolation to say they died for their country.
The anniversary of the Uvalde shootings within days of Memorial Day has me thinking about the ways in which we memorialize the dead, privately and collectively.
As a national observance, Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day — a day for decorating the graves of those who died in the Civil War. It was three years after the war had ended, May 30th the designated date, Arlington National Cemetery where the ceremonies took place.
Some twenty cities had laid claim to local springtime tributes prior to the official national designation in 1868. One of the first, and possibly the most interesting, took place in Columbus, Miss., April 25, 1866, when a group of women, decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers who had fallen in battle at Shiloh, also placed flowers on the graves of Union soldiers buried nearby and neglected because they were the enemy.
World War I expanded the scope of Memorial Day to include those who died in all American wars though wasn’t until 1971 that it was declared a national holiday observed on the last Monday in May.
And, yet, what does it say that there are several states in the South that still mark days honoring the Confederate dead?
Aren’t we a nation at war with itself — a war that has only gotten uglier and nastier in the past few years? A war played out in dance clubs and rock concerts, churches and shopping malls. An insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. And inside the very places we send our children to learn and socialize.
And is it a stretch to draw an equivalence between those who die on distant battlefields defending our interests and those who die right here at home at the hands of those defending nothing but misguided and misconstrued beliefs?
Guns don’t kill. People kill. Really?
We’re nothing if not a population of differing views and alliances, both politically and culturally. And that can be a very good thing. It gets bad when we stop owning up to our commonalities, or at least listening to each other. At the top of trigger issues that divide us is out-of-control gun culture, so intertwined with interpretations of the Second Amendment. As the NRA spins it, the wording gives individuals the right to arm themselves, no questions asked. A more nuanced look suggests that the Founding Fathers were more militia-minded when they deemed the right to bear arms as constitutionally protected.
Who can forget the startling art drawn from JFK’s assassination, Bill Mauldln’s “Weeping Lincoln?” It was James Madison who proposed the Second Amendment. I can readily imagine a rendition of him seated in his statue in the Library of Congress, also weeping to see what time and re-interpretation have wrought.
Statistics are numbing, almost meaningless. It’s the power of one, the individual story that speaks volumes.
I can’t do this life without you.
December 2000 saw passage of The National Moment of Remembrance Act, along with creation of the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance. The commission’s charter is to “encourage the people of the United States to give something back to their country, which provides them so much freedom and opportunity.” Story has it that people were forgetting the purpose of Memorial Day. One child, when asked about it, said it was the day the pools opened. It seemed a little boost was needed, a call to collectively pause at 3 p.m. local time for a minute of silence.
We all have our belief systems, some more embedded than others, and it’s easy enough to find support for them online.
At this point in 2023, the U.S. is on track to set a record for mass shootings. Regardless where you stand on the Second Amendment, doesn’t it stand to reason that banning the sale of assault weapons, or at least putting significant restrictions in place, would be a huge step in bringing those numbers down? It’s called common sense, something in short supply in our divided country. Even the ban on bump stops approved by Congress is under appeal.
If nothing else, I take heart and a little hope in knowing there’s a National Gun Violence Awareness Month, an outgrowth of Sandy Hook Promise, which, by no small coincidence, begins days after Memorial Day.
