As I sit here in my quiet house on a rainy Memorial Day morning the thunder rumbles in the distance. Later today the family will gather for some good food and company, but now I am wandering the web reading Memorial Day posts. Eventually I’ll get around to my email, but for now it’s the thoughtful posts of memory that are holding my interest.
Leon Hale, in his newspaper column today talks of remembering the 14 friends he lost in WWII. There was one line in his column today that summed up Memorial Day in a whole new way for me…
I don’t need Memorial Day to remind me of these friends. I think about them all the time. Fourteen lives that didn’t get lived.
“Lives that didn’t get lived”. That’s what Memorial Day is, a honoring of the sacrifice of a life, a life not lived to completion. The families not formed or left unfinished, the friends left behind and the friends unmade, the wives and children, both left behind and never created…The lives unlived.
Spend some time today and think on the lives that didn’t get lived…There have been a lot of those unlived lives in this nation’s history. It’s our responsibility to all of those unlived lives to be sure that their sacrifice was justified, that the many lives that will never be because of those cut short are worth the sacrifice we demand of our warriors.
On this Memorial Day as more lives are being put on the line in battles around this world, we must always remember it isn’t the life that ended we are memorializing…It’s the life that wasn’t lived.