It’s Sunday, Memorial Day weekend. I’m walking the fields of the dead today, laying down flowers, calling up memories. It’s heavy business, requiring a stout heart.

Some of us show up to honor our relatives today, not just those who served and died in service but all those lost. But the graveyard is full of flags, and the flags say, walk here among those who served, those who died, those who came home if forever changed. It’s Flanders Field. It’s Arlington. It’s Normandy.

And I’m thinking of my friend Tom Nolan’s novel Just a Walk in the Park, a “fictionalized account” as he says of his time in Vietnam as a Marine corporal. At one point the narrator says, “I died inside during operation Medina, and the only emotion I could now feel was my friendship for these great young men. I had come to realize how insignificant my life was and how important it was to keep these friends alive for their families and loved ones back home. I no longer remember home. I cannot see back past the horror.”

At another point, he is writing home to his former English teacher Mrs. Anderson at Maple Grove High School. She sometimes shared his letters aloud with her students. He says at one point, none of your students want “to see this horror, ever. I have changed because of it and I am no longer the class clown…I don’t know why we are here as the South Vietnamese people don’t want us here either. They just want a thirty-year-old war to end.” There’s such angst in his narrative voice, such aching to understand war and humanity.

Tom reminds Mrs. Anderson how he was a terrible student, never did his work, and often got thrown out of class. I imagine he aced his tests though he didn’t study at all. He had a facile mind, sharp, 100 steps ahead of everyone. It was a disquiet mind. Funny, sarcastic, irreverent. That’s the narrator in his novel. But let us be clear: in Nam, he was heroic. He was one of our American sons who outmaneuvered death and came back home.

It could have been any war, really. He is the kind of soldier we remember and celebrate today. And we remember all those who did not come home again.

I’m thinking of my friend Dave Licate who died at 21 or 22 blown up by a bomb somewhere in a steamy jungle on the other side of the world. He was a funny guy too. My friend Nancy Jones might have married him had he made it home. But he didn’t. And frankly, I’m not sure she survived him not coming home, not 100%. That’s kind of my point today.

It’s memorial day, memorial weekend, and it’s parade and a good time and noodle salad. We’re waving flags and feeling patriotic. Having a beer. Some of us are there in cemeteries to plant flowers not just for veterans but for all our relatives and friends. It may be the only time we step foot in those cemeteries for the year. I’m not judging. Cemeteries are odd places. They make us feel queer. We’re there to do our duty, celebrate and remember the dead. Yesterday when I dug in the dirt in front of my mother’s grave and my grandmother’s grave, my aunt’s grave, my stepfather’s grave, I got dirt under my nails. My sister was there digging right next to me. She was wearing the purple gloves we just bought at the Dollar Store. I didn’t wear any. Somehow– though I’ve never minded dirt the dirt–the dark dirt of Fluvanna Cemetery seemed full of blood and loss, and I couldn’t quite get it out from under my nails when I got home. My nails are long and manicured and rose colored. I feel they will never be quite clean and beautiful again. I don’t usually feel that way in cemeteries. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe death is nearer now. Yesterday it felt depressive, downright eerie.

I think it’s this. The dead change us. The dead change us. Lest we not forget. Whenever we visit them in the cemeteries of America we stand above their graves, and we sigh and moan and talk. We talk about the past; we try to make connections between who they really were and how we really feel about them.

So, I’m sitting outside on Monday, official Memorial Day. It’s 73 degrees. The sun is shining on me. There were parades in Jamestown and Lakewood and Busti and Mayville. High schoolers dressed up in their band uniforms. They marched and played proudly. Little kids waved little flags from the sidewalks. Families met and drank beer and ate hot dogs and hamburgers roasted on the grill. It’s all good. All of that is part of living. Yet this weekend is a celebration of those past. The dead. A word we don’t use often. It’s a heavy word. When I came home from planting flowers on graves, my heart was thick, and I could not scrub the dirt from my hands. I thought, these dead. We walk among them. We take them with us. They stick to us. We don’t forget them.

On this day we pay tribute to those who served, to those who fought and died or saved others, who kept us free. Free to eat noodle salad and wave our flags, eat with our families on the lawn, cook out, laugh and grin, but sometimes it’s difficult to whistle past the graveyard.