Every Memorial Day weekend when the kids were young, we loaded up the car in Michigan and made the drive down I-77 to North Carolina to visit my wife’s family.
It was always a festive trip. Extended family came by and the house filled up. The weekend had a rhythm we knew well.
The first Memorial Day after Jess died, we made the drive anyway.
I couldn’t tell you why exactly. Maybe because not going felt like admitting something we weren’t ready to admit. Maybe because staying home seemed worse. We packed the car and drove south the way we always had.
The house filled up the way it always did. Family came by. People talked and ate and caught up. My wife could put a smile on her face during the day. I could not do even that. All weekend, my thoughts were somewhere else. Not in that house. Not at that table. With the person who wasn’t there.
At night, when the visitors left, grief took over for both of us.
Memorial Day is the one day the culture officially sets aside to honor the dead. We put it on the calendar. We made it a federal holiday. The intention was real.
And then, over generations, it became something else. The unofficial start of summer. The first long weekend. Sales and cookouts and lake houses.
The same avoidance the culture practices every other day of the year, it practices on the one day it reserved for acknowledgment.
That is not a coincidence. It is the pattern, operating at a national scale.
For anyone who has lost someone in recent months, this weekend will feel different than it does for the people around them. The people around them are marking the start of something. They are marking an absence.
Some of them will do what my wife did. Smile during the day. Fall apart when the company leaves.
Some of them will do what I did. Not even manage the smile. Just sit inside their own thoughts while the weekend moves around them.
The holiday that was supposed to name the dead is mostly a long weekend now. That incongruity is invisible to everyone who hasn’t recently lost someone. For the people who have, it lands.
There is a version of holiday grief that arrives with the empty chair. You know the day is coming and you brace for it.
There is another version that arrives with the weekend itself. Everyone around you is celebrating. The culture gave you no permission to do anything else.
So we drive down I-77 like we always have, walk into a house full of family, and spend three days thinking about the person who isn’t there.
The culture has no script for that.
It never did.
Until next time,
John
John H. Callaghan
P.S. My book, A Beautiful Farewell, is available on Amazon. It tells the story of a family navigating the loss of a parent, and the funeral professional who became their guide.