Memorial Day 2025

It’s been a while. What with one thing and another, I haven’t shared a post with you at all this May. Now here we are, Memorial Day 2025. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to say “Happy Memorial Day!” It’s too solemn for that. It’s meant to be a day of remembrance, a day to honor those who gave their all.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. Just this morning I finished The Women by Kristin Hannah, a powerful book about the women who served in Vietnam. (I highly recommend it.) Yesterday, I visited Calverton National Cemetery to pay my respects to my loved ones who fought for our country, though thankfully, made it home to live full lives. As I drove to their graves, I marveled at the sea of American flags placed at each grave. So many. Too many. Close to 300,000 in this one cemetery. My eyes filled with tears.

It could be argued that they died so that all of us could continue to celebrate our freedom. That is true. But take a moment to remember the cost of that freedom so that their sacrifices were not in vain.

~~

I’ve written a lot of poems for Memorial Day, some somber, others cheerful. Today, I remembered this one that I wrote more than a decade ago. I thought I would share it with you to remember—Thank you, Henry, and all those who served.

Henry, Still Remembered

Long before the internet, email, and social media,
in that long lost era when communication still came
in letters written on paper and penned in ink,
people still made friends with strangers:
We called them pen pals.
In the years before the Summer of Love,
I'd had pen pals from around the world,
young girls my own age with similar interests.
We shared our cultures and how we wished
we could trade places;
we talked about what teenage girls always talk about--
music and boys. 
Henry was different; Henry was a young man.
Henry was a soldier, fighting in Vietnam.
At first I was delighted to get his address,
excited and a little scared too;
he was only five years older than me,
but at fifteen that felt like eons.
I worried he'd think I was just a kid,
and what could I possibly say that would interest him.
I needn't have worried.
I was too young to realize that talking about normal things
like the weather, music, and our friends,
could be a balm when you're living in a war zone.
Henry was sweet.
He told me about his home in the Midwest.
He never wrote about the war,
and I never asked.
I thought we were getting on well,
even harbored secret fantasies that when he came home
he might stop in New York so we could meet in person,
and who knew what might come of that.
Then the letters stopped.
In the self-centered way of the young
I wondered what I had said or done
to made him stop writing without any explanation.
It never occurred to me
that he might not have been able to write;
in my naivete I never dreamed he might be dead.
I'm ashamed that I didn't consider those things,
that for so long I thought it was about me and my shortcomings.
I was young, but old enough to know better.
I believed in the peace movement;
I had the posters on my walls;
I knew “war is not healthful to children and other living things”.
But that's the thing about war--
you don't really know until it touches you firsthand.
Looking back across the decades,
a kaleidoscope of experience changes the view,
blending colors and shading perspective.
I still wonder what happened to Henry.
Did he die in some faraway rice paddy?
Was he taken as a POW, and still among those MIA?
Was he crippled and sent home to recuperate
with more important things to occupy his mind
than writing letters to a teenage girl he never met?
Did he come home broken and battling PTSD?
Did he manage to survive the war to live a full life,
only to suffer the repercussions of exposure to Agent Orange,
the gift that keeps on giving?
I will never know the answers to any of these questions.
The details, like Henry's last name or the state he hailed from, are lost to me.
The realist in me knows that these dread imaginings
are not only possible, but probable.
Yet a childlike hope still lives in my heart
that Henry stopped writing because of something that I said,
that he made it home in one piece to live his own happily ever after,
that he lives and loves and laughs there still.
That is how I choose to remember Henry.

Elise Skidmore ©2025

(Note: You can find this poem in my third book, A Dance of Dreams.)