MEMORIAL DAY

Growing up, if my brothers and I behaved, my grandmother would let us wear one or another of my Uncle Gerry’s World War II medals at the annual Memorial Day parade in the city where we lived, Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He had several including a Purple Heart and the nation’s second highest military decoration, the Distinguished Service Cross.

Gerry’s citations were awarded posthumously in late summer 1942 four months after he died at Midway on June 4^th. His plane, Satan’s Playmate, with a crew of five, took off from Midway Island at 6:15 AM in search of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s huge Japanese fleet of carriers and destroyers.

At 7AM on a brilliant clear Pacific day they spotted the enemy armada below and under fierce combat fire began a torpedo run on the carrier Akagi. By 7:10 AM the crew of Satan’s Playmate were dead and the carrier badly damaged.

Three weeks later my grandmother, Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, sat on the stoop of our house accompanied by her parish priest and a Western Union employee. She held a telegram from the War Department notifying her that Lt. Gerald J. Barnicle was missing in action. In late July she received another telegram notifying her that her youngest son had been killed in action.

Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, born and raised in Cork, Ireland, emigrated to the United States in 1916. She died in 1961 at 84. She witnessed two world wars, suffered through a depression, lost twin daughters aged one, her husband in 1936, her oldest son Francis in 1941, went to Mass every day of her life and always, till the day she died, held out the futile hope - a dream really - that Gerald would return home some day.

For her, every day was Memorial Day because the root of the word is memory. Like so many other parents touched with the grief, the shock, the tears and toll of burying a child she never got over his loss and never lived another day without thinking about her brave boy.

I never knew him but I couldn’t forget him. He was killed well before I was born but remained a daily presence in our home and in the lives of our family. A picture of him in uniform hung on the parlor wall in between two framed letters to my grandmother; one from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the other from General George C. Marshall,  both thanking her for her son’s sacrifice.

His name was always mentioned by one speaker or another at the annual Memorial Day observance. The local AMVETS Post was named after him. A few of the men he grew up with, went to school with and served in the same war that claimed him would occasionally tell me that I reminded them of him, of Lt. Gerald J. Barnicle.

Why, I did not know. What I got to understand though was the powerful impact of memory and the weight of loss, two handles of personal history most people carry every single day.

Memorial Day was and remains a day to reflect on the lives of those who served our country, who wore the uniform, who fell in combat. In cemeteries coast to coast, parents and siblings and some who shared service with the fallen will kneel on freshly mowed grass to utter a silent prayer or just stare at a name etched in granite.

Lately much of the day’s meaning seems to have been somewhat lost due to the TikTok memory so contagious in this land so filled with calamity and casualties. It often seems as if we are served a daily buffet of homicide and horror.

We move from school shootings like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High and Uvalde to everyday mass shootings in Las Vegas. Orlando, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, Buffalo or some location within easy driving distance of our own front door and it seems the impact of death is quickly diminished by the volume and frequency of such events.

We lost more than a million Americans to the plague of Covid. Too many of them died staring at a wife, children, close friends from a hospital window, their final days and hours spent without the human touch or contact with a next of kin. Just tweet or text a goodbye.

Grief knows no single cause. Loss arrives with no regard for zip code, gender, race or income. Both seem to be lasting, often muted by the passage of time, but ever lingering.

Memory however might be different. Might be threatened a bit by the deluge of  daily often hourly casualties popping up everywhere around us, all day, every day. How do we reflect on tragedy in time to brace ourselves for the next one?

Can Memorial Day include the memories of those who have fallen to the gun or rifle here in America? Can we reflect on the lives lost to covid because of the initial inadequacy of our government?

Memorial Day is after all for the fallen and often forgotten.

Years ago I spotted a sign on a Boston street, a marker memorializing those killed in World War II. I remember pulling over to the side of the road to get a good look at the small sign.

It was dedicated to two brothers: “Thomas W. Keenan Jr - U.S. Marines 1920-1944” and “Gerald J. Keenan U.S. Navy 1925-1944.” I was struck by the fact that someone in the Keenan household probably received a telegram similar to the one my grandmother was handed in the summer of ’42.

And I figured that after 50 years between the time both died in war and when I spotted the street marker it would be hard to find anyone who remembered them. And it’s understandable too; neighbors pass, families move, time often acting as local history’s eraser,

I did discover that Thomas was killed July 14, 1944 on Tinian in the Pacific. Two weeks later his brother Gerald died when a Japanese submarine torpedoed his ship, the Canberra.

I was told a priest and a Western Union man brought the telegram to Thomas and Helen Keenan, parents of 10 children. And their son Joe told me back then something every mother and father who ever lived with loss knows when he said, “My parents never got over it.”

Memorial Day!