I’ve always been drawn to cemeteries.
Specifically, those housing history’s heroes. Or grave sites strewn with baseballs, bats and caps like slugger Babe Ruth’s final resting place near New York City. Or towering tombs of love or larger-than-life statues like the one for former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s beloved wife, Raisa, in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Although tears are not part of my graveyard excursions, I am apparently a weeper at the military ones, dissolving unexpectedly at the graves of World War II war soldiers.
This weekend will mark what has become a whisper to many Americans — a special set-aside National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day to recognize what many Americans have long forgotten, the sudden slaughter of 2,403 soldiers and civilians on Dec. 7, 1941, at a harbor in Hawaii.
In the blink of an eye, a barrage of Japanese airmen would destroy two U.S. Navy battleships and 188 aircraft and usher our nation into a world at war.
This National Remembrance Day, basically revisited in flickered images of old war movies, is still commemorated nationwide. And it’s honored by the U.S. military and visitors from around the world in the Hawaiian harbor where history happened 83 years ago.
A whim visit 57 years ago drew me to the Pearl Harbor grave of the USS Arizona, a battleship so irreparably damaged in the Japanese airstrike she still lies underwater — entombing 900 sailors and marines in her wreckage, heroes underneath our feet. It’s a place of silence and, soon after I got there, of unexpected tears.
And that emotional visit drew me to the Hawaiian grave of World War II news correspondent Ernie Pyle, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist killed in action a month before the “war to end all wars” ended in June 1945.
Pyle, 44, had accompanied young soldiers to war who could have been his sons. He was a wordsmith who championed the GI, telling the story of the American fighting man “as American fighting men wanted them to be told,” said President Harry “Give ‘em Hell” Truman.
Machine gunned to death, Pyle is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, famously known as the “Punchbowl,” not far from the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.
Tears began to roll again.
The silent sadness of a military cemetery is never limited to geography.
In 1976, I observed an American couple surrounded by the graves of 9,389 American military buried on French soil near the Normandy beaches of D-Day at Colleville-sur-Mer. Their story was heartbreaking.
Now frozen in time was a woman, who was about my own mother’s age, weeping with one hand on a grave, the other in the nook of the arm of a man steadying her, both of their heads in repose.
It had been eerily quiet during my Hawaiian visits to the USS Arizona memorial and newspaper legend Ernie Pyle’s grave. And it was just as quiet at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France as we were all transfixed by what turned out to be a man’s promise to his wife — a vow to one day bring her to visit the grave of her first husband, an American soldier killed during war.
And he had kept his promise, holding her hand while he did it, a sad and touching and miraculous moment all at once.
This couple is part of the heart of all cemeteries: the quiet contemplation of love beyond death.
My dad, who fought in the Pacific theater of World War II, was also stationed in Honolulu at the Hickam Air Force Base not long after the Pearl Harbor attack. My father talked little about the war, but he talked about Pearl Harbor.
Before his death in 1978, Dad, who always remained close to his war buddies, asked my mother to bury him in a simple U.S. Army coffin — with a final request: that they be buried next to each other one day.
When mom died, we disinterred my father and buried them both in a lovely little cemetery in Mandan, N.D., where my mother’s family had lived not far from the mighty Missouri River.
I may well up at military memorials, but as his first child born when he was off to war, I never remember crying at Dad’s grave.
After all, Dad, a war hero himself, got to come home.
And for that, I am forever grateful to all those heroes who could not.
That will be my special remembrance on Pearl Harbor Day.
Sneedlings…
Condolences to my dear friend, attorney Delilah Flaum, whose beloved husband, federal Judge Joel M. Flaum, a revered member of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, died Wednesday. Miraculously, he had been honored weeks earlier by the U.S. Supreme Court with the nation’s highest judicial honor that can be bestowed on a federal judge: the 2024 Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award. … Saturday birthdays: actress Ellen Burstyn, 92. … Sunday birthdays: actress Kim Bassinger, 71.
