There Is No Right Word for Memorial Day
What Memorial Day asks of you, and what it doesn’t require
The cashier at the grocery store is going to say it. Maybe already has.
Happy Memorial Day.
I have a silver KIA bracelet I wear most days. It catches the light sometimes when I’m doing something ordinary, like sliding a packet of hot dog buns across a checkout counter. And when the cashier says happy, I think of the man whose name is on my wrist, his wife, his child who never knew him. Happy feels like the wrong word for what I’m holding in that moment.
Because Happy Memorial Day is not the right greeting for this day (keep reading for alternative phrases to use).
Memorial Day is a holiday weekend, but it is not the Fourth of July. It is a day of remembrance for the men and women who died in service to this country. Treating it as a seasonal pleasantry, something to say between a sale on chips and a cooler full of beer, strips the day of the reverence it was built to carry. Most civilians don’t recognize or honor that distinction. And most of us have learned to absorb it quietly and keep moving.
Because “Happy Memorial Day” is not the right greeting for this day.
But here’s what I’ve also learned: the weight you carry today is yours, and it doesn’t look the same for every person who served. Whatever lands in your chest in the two seconds after that greeting, it belongs to you. It doesn’t have to look like grief to count as honoring. It doesn’t have to look like sorrow to mean you remember.
Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s pride so deep it has no words. Maybe it’s quiet gratitude that you’re still here, still standing, still able to feel the sun on your face when you walk to your car. Maybe today is fine and three days from now something ordinary will stop you cold. The smell of a certain place. A song on the radio. A name you haven’t said out loud in a while.
Whatever you're feeling right now, my friend, that's the right answer.
Major Laverne Santangelo, Ret. | Grief Recovery Specialist
One of the truest things I’ve learned about grief comes from Laverne. A 23-year Army National Guard veteran who built her entire clinical practice inside this terrain. Grief does not announce itself on a schedule; It moves through us named or unnamed. The only difference is what we can do with it once we can see it.
It borrows other names: Pride. Anger. Numbness. The need to stay busy from sunup to dark. The impulse to be around people, or to be completely alone. None of those responses are wrong; they are grief finding the only route available to it.
Memorial Day gives grief permission to surface, and that doesn’t mean it surfaces the same way for every person reading this.
[Listen to Laverne’s full conversation, EP8 on Hardcore and At Ease]
Sarah Merwin | Navy Veteran, Founder of Holbrook Farms
Sarah is a woman veteran who lost her husband during his time in service. She built Holbrook Farms, a retreat community in Minnesota for military widows and women who have lost siblings and children in service, because she could see what was missing. A room full of people who already know. She sat at the first retreat dinner herself, planning to hold the container for everyone else. She realized that night she needed what she’d built just as much as anyone across the table from her.
No correct way to carry this day exists, and Sarah understood that before she had words for it.
You can be at the cookout laughing and mean every bit of it - that is not a betrayal of anyone you’ve lost. You can go quiet in the middle of a conversation, somewhere behind your own eyes, and the people around you won’t know where you went, and you don’t have to explain it. You can skip the ceremony entirely and sit somewhere private and say a name to nobody in particular. You can feel happy and sad inside the same hour and have no clean word for either feeling.
Grief, when it shows up, doesn’t require performance. And neither does joy.
[Listen to Sarah’s full conversation, EP42 on Hardcore and At Ease]
Chaplain Brian Webb | Army Chaplain, 20+ Years
Chaplain Brian Webb has stood in more doorways of loss than most people will encounter in a lifetime. What he has said, in different ways, is this: sometimes we don’t know what we’re carrying until we’re already in the middle of carrying it.
This day can hold loss that has no official name. The version of yourself you left behind at separation. The community that dissolved when the unit did. The future you built plans around that closed differently than you expected. Those losses don’t come with folded flags; they don’t get a ceremony. They move through you on days like this too, and they are real terrain.
You don’t have to name it perfectly to honor it.
[Listen to Chaplain Brian’s full conversation, EP25 on Hardcore and At Ease]
If today is stirring something and you want to go deeper, this week’s paid posts hold more of this conversation.
The Grief Wilderness post, [The terrain with no finish line], names the markers that define grief as wilderness and brings in Laverne, Chaplain Brian, and Sarah to hold the full weight of it.
And if today is specifically about missing someone, the person who was your witness, the Memorial Day post from earlier this year is still there for you: [The Thing Nobody Tells You About Memorial Day When You’ve Lost Someone].
ARTICLE PREVIEWS + LINKS
Grief: the Terrain Without a Finish Line
I have sat with women in the middle of losses that had no name. The divorce that was the right decision and still broke her heart. The retirement that looked like success from the outside and felt like loneliness on the inside. The estrangement that stretched into years and then into a phone call nobody was ready for. The sister first on the scene of a
The Thing Nobody Tells You About Memorial Day When You’ve Lost Someone
I have a silver KIA bracelet around my wrist most days. It honors Second Lieutenant Luke S. James, United States, Airborne, Bravo Company, 2/504 PIR. Killed in action January 27, 2004, Iskanderya, Iraq.
Alternatives to “Happy Memorial Day”
So what do we say instead of Happy Memorial Day? There is no single right answer here either. But here are a few that carry the weight of the day without asking anyone to perform joy they may not feel.
We remember them.
May their memory be honored today.
Thank you for remembering.
Honor and remembrance to you today.
Say the one that feels true to you. All of them honor the day.
However you’re moving through today, with a name on your wrist, a face in your memory, a full heart, or something you can’t put words to yet, you don’t have to explain it.
We already know some of what it feels like.
Be At Ease.
Another stunner,Shelly. I’m going to go forward and use, “May their honor and bravery be remembered today, and always”. I’ve made it a repeating calendar note.