I happened to be in Bradenton, Florida visiting family this past weekend. The route from Tampa to Bradenton took us through St. Petersburg, and past a small cemetery called Sunnyside.
Although it’s only a few hundred feet from the freeway, and alongside another main thoroughfare, the air is quiet and still except for the humming cicadas. A light breeze cuts the humidity, stirring the Spanish moss and carrying a faint smell of flowers. A few families walk slowly across grounds, kids kicking up the sandy dirt, parents brushing away the leaves that accumulate over the flat gravestones. One elderly lady sits motionless for twenty minutes, hand on a gravestone, without saying a word – at least, none that anyone can hear, or are meant to hear.
It’s not such a bad place to spend eternity, if only you didn’t have to die mangled at 22 years old, to be brought back to lie alongside a mother whose death was hastened by your own, to have the rest of your family gradually fill in the spaces beside you until one day there was nobody left to come visit, to leave flowers or a stone or even a flag. You might have been a nonagenarian visitor yourself, or the elderly lady might have been communing with your gravestone, a stone with dates spanning more than 1922 to 1945. But it doesn’t, and she isn’t, and you’re not.
None of these things happened because you chose to leave your family and home, volunteered to fight and fought bravely, and were in the wrong place at the wrong time and lost everything you could have had. You didn’t do it for you; you did it for them, for us, even for the Northern stranger en route to his family who showed up and then didn’t know what to say to thank you or to show that you’re still remembered, so he cleaned up a little, took a few photos, patted your headstone and walked away.
We don’t know what you sacrificed; the living will never know, so we try to quantify with “everything,” but really it’s beyond our abilities to comprehend. We attempt to keep your life story alive, but every time we tell it, it always ends too soon, and it’s never a happy ending. So we try our best to remember, because it’s the only thing we understand how to do, the only way to keep the ending from being so utterly heartbreaking.
Today, at least, for a few minutes in the shade of Sunnyside Cemetery, you were alive again. I hope a few words of heartfelt thanks were enough. They were all that I could offer.
That, and the promise to remember.
Semper Fi, Ellis.
