Honor The Parents

Memorial Day and Memorial Day Weekend move into memory. Hot dogs and potato salad, parades and proclamations over, families resume their lives ...if they have not lost someone in a war. Yes, we are sensitive to the loss of lives and the questions around war. But that sensitivity and those questions are different for a parent who has brought a child, now turned adult, through crisis after crises growing up. When the time came for their son or daughter to exercise the independence that parents nurture, it couldn't have been easy to wave them goodbye to go off to fight in any war. Every day must be filled with anxiety for parents with a son or daughter engaged in battle 24 hours a day. It's not the measles, or the first date, or first automoble, its war and death lurking in every minute if they are on the field of battle. The empty place at the dinner table, their absence at holidays, the loved face threatened with extinction. When a death notice comes to a parent it must seem like the darkest night of their soul. Honors, folded flags, comfort from friends and family and then the silence of the forever absent. Memorial Day opens the memory wider and the grief returns along with the good times remembered. So, if we stop our nation for a day to remember the dead we must remember the living.
Parents Day Might be useful new national holiday.