When The Distance Disappeared

Before it was a long weekend, it was a funeral.

We don’t usually start there, though. We start with charcoal and lake plans and campers heading north. Memorial Day has become the unofficial kickoff to summer, whether we admit it or not. Boats come out of storage as school sports and graduations begin to ease. There’s this hum of preparation as the season begins its first noticeable shift.

And somewhere toward the end of that hum of busyness, there are flags.

If you drive past Elmwood Cemetery this week, or probably any cemetery, you’ll see them lined up beside headstones, poking up from the grass. They show up every year. Someone takes the time to place them, though most of us notice them in passing, as we race off for a bag of charcoal or ice before heading up north.

My understanding of Memorial Day changed at a relatively young age. It changed on a cold afternoon in February of 2007, standing as a young firefighter on the corner of 20 Mile Road and Peach Ridge in Kent City, Michigan, rendering a salute to a fallen soldier as he was carried to his final resting place. The procession moved slowly, northward toward Pinewood Cemetery. Flags not only lined the road, but hung, massively, from the high platforms of fire trucks. Firefighters and police officers from all the surrounding towns and beyond stood at attention. It was a scene you hope never reaches your own community. One you assume belongs somewhere else, attached to a headline from far away.

Taps was played that afternoon and you could hear it a mile away. The notes seemed to hang in the air longer than expected, stretching out across the cemetery, the fields, and orchards beyond it. It felt as though even the wind silenced itself out of respect.

There is something different about loss when it reaches into your own community, when the name being spoken is one you had heard called out not so many years ago. The distance between “over there” and “right here” disappears quickly.

And it did.

The name being spoken that day was one I had heard called out on the football field and in the gymnasium. The soldier being laid to rest was someone I had once shared the school hallways with. His brother would, only three years later, become my brother-in-law. He wasn’t a headline from some far away town.

He was one of us.

Up until that point, Memorial Day had mostly felt historical to me. It belonged to black and white photographs, to chapters in textbooks, and wars discussed in past tense. That February afternoon changed that perspective. It placed it in a cemetery I had visited before, along roads I had driven a hundred times, among families who would have to keep living with the emptiness that would follow.

Now when Memorial Day weekend comes around and I see the flags, I no longer see tradition. I see that corner in little Kent City, Michigan. I hear Taps carrying through the apple trees, and I think about how quickly a name can move from a yearbook to a headstone.

Still, summer comes, as it always does. Kids will ride their bikes, boats and campers will head north, and people will sit around a fire telling stories late into the night. And that’s how it should be.

The freedom to treat this weekend as the beginning of something lighter was secured by people who gave up the chance to see how their own stories would unfold.

SPC Brandon Lee Stout. 1983–2007. He was one of us.