Memorial Day

Memorial Day, 2012. This is the day to honor our war dead as well as all those people we knew and loved who went before us. we should really honor our war dead on more than one day a year. Three hundred and sixty-five would be better. When I was growing up, I think it was much more a day to remember the dead, any dead regardless of whether it was from military service or natural causes. Back then, our little town had only two wars on which to look back, WWI and II, and we must not have had many who died in either war, at least none that I remember. And what will we be doing this Memorial Day? Seeing a movie and a D-Backs baseball game. I don’t much believe in visiting cemeteries and examining granite headstones. Not that that’s a bad thing. I just don’t believe any of the dead hang around their gravesites. They’re simply not there. I believe the dead live on in their closest living relatives. Not exactly reincarnation, but something like that. If there’s a psychic connection between the living and the dead, then it would have to be with a relative, a son or daughter, most likely, but any other relative if no son or daughter is around. Whitman echoed Emerson’s belief in the Over-soul and envisioned a vast spiritual sea from which we are taken at birth for our brief stay here, then returned to that Over-soul when we die. All of life is connected. Sort of a spiritual Facebook.