Anamnesis

Although May 30th is its historical date, chosen specifically because it was not the date of any significant Civil War battle, we officially celebrate Memorial Day today. Unlike President Bush, I think it better not to use the occasion to argue politics.

My father was a World War II veteran, a sailor serving in the Aleutian Islands. My Uncle Ed was a soldier “over there” in France during World War I. He once showed me a box of decorations his grandfather had received for service as a Union soldier during the Civil War. A cousin by marriage was a Korean War POW and spent the rest of his life in a deep alcoholic depression. They are all dead now, though none died in military service.

My father’s family dates back to the 1600s in Maryland and the genealogical records show family service in the Revolutionary War and probably every military conflict thereafter. My mother’s family records were lost over time or destroyed during the Civil War, but suffice it to say there have been Smiths in Virginia for a very long time and they were all a scrappy lot. Of course, I never knew any of those men and thus I have no memories of them.

The war of my generation was Viet Nam. When I turned eighteen, I first had a student deferment from the draft and then a high lottery number, and then the war was over and so was the draft. Although I worked for several decades for the Army, Navy and Air Force, I never served in uniform and it is hardly the same thing. As for my cohort, there isn’t a single name on the Viet Nam Memorial of someone I knew. The few early deaths among friends in my generation were caused by diseases, accidents and drug overdoses. There is one ironic and tragic exception. One member of my high school graduating class joined the Marines, served in Viet Nam and returned safely only to be shot to death a short time later in his own home in a dispute with a family member.

Of the men of my generation who did serve in Viet Nam and came home safely, by the time an ungrateful nation stopped spitting at them and calling them baby killers they no longer felt inclined to share their experiences in that war except perhaps among each other. Too often, it seems, not even then. If there really are such things as lessons from Viet Nam, I don’t know what they are.

Memorial Day having started as Decorations Day in tribute specifically to fallen Union soldiers of the Civil War, it was met at first with resistance in the South and accepted there only after more wars and more war dead to which, as in the Civil War itself, the southern states contributed their share to the vast charnel houses of war. In the South of my childhood generally and in our family particularly, Memorial Day became a day of remembrance for all the dead, and I would drive with my father on Memorial Day to a cemetery in D.C. where he and I would tidy up the grave of my paternal grandmother, Ida.

Although my father was eligible for burial in Arlington Cemetery, my parents chose to buy adjoining cemetery plots not far from my childhood home. They are buried there together now for many years, though I have visited less than a half dozen times since my father’s death nearly twenty years ago. I know exactly where their graves are and exactly what their marker looks like. I see it in my mind as I write these words. Am I a disloyal or disrespectful son for not going there more often to actually witness once again the site of their mortal remains? I don’t know. I know only that I don’t go and that, for whatever reason, I sometimes feel guilty as a result, but my memory of my parents does not require that I be there.

As for the official purpose of Memorial Day, remembering those who died in military service to the nation, the point I was making implicitly above is that, unlike my memory of my parents, I have no actual memories at all of any such people. I can honor them, but I cannot literally remember them. You cannot remember someone you never knew, and I have never known anyone who died in military service.

That might strike the reader as a sort of fustian way of being dismissive of Memorial Day or of its purpose, but I don’t mean it as such. I note it because it simply will not do to pretend that my relationship with those men and women is at all the same as that of those who really knew and loved them. I am incapable, as it were, of anamnesis.

Anamnesis, like its better known cousin amnesia, derives from ancient Greek and translates roughly as memory or remembrance. It finds its first significant usage in Plato’s epistemology, his notion that knowledge derives from recollected memory of the forms or ideals; but it is also a critical concept in Christian theology and it is that sense I mean here. It is the sort of memory distinguished from the act of remembering obscure names or dates or facts of any sort but the memory instead that washes over us every time we see or think of someone we could never forget; a parent or child or spouse or lifelong friend.

It is that deeper, richer sense of memory and not merely the sense of remembering, say, that I once owned a blue 1966 Karmann Ghia or the lyrics to “Yesterday” or even the name of the girl I had a crush on in elementary school (Patty) that Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me” is meant to covey. We can honor those we have never known with rites and rituals or decorations and parades and monuments. We can understand the significance of their sacrifices and be appropriately grateful. But we cannot remember strangers as others can or once could, and we should remember that, too.