Ceremonies in Cemeteries

MY VIEW  |  Denise Dunbar

One of my earliest childhood memories is of Memorial Day in southern Indiana.  While it included a huge family gathering with lots of great food, “Lindy humor” (you don’t want to know) and listening to the Indy 500 car race on the radio, what was most memorable was the Memorial Day service at the local cemetery.  


Anyone who has spent much time in southern Indiana knows it’s a bit lacking on the beauty scale.  This particular patch — between the small towns of Princeton and Petersburg — remains about as rural as America gets.  There are cornfields, soybean fields, oil wells (it’s true!) and roads that constantly turn at 90 degree angles as you pass from one farmer’s property to another.  There are great stretches of open space.

There is also, at the edge of the “town” of Union — which consists of one store near the halfway point between Princeton and Petersburg — a beautiful little cemetery.  Surrounded by a stand of oak trees, the Union cemetery is a few-acre square mini-oasis in the midst of mundane farmland.  No matter how hot it was, and Memorial Day in Indiana was always scorching hot, there was always shade and a breeze in the cemetery.

Every Memorial Day, even now, local veterans hold a lovely ceremony in the cemetery.  The oldest veterans in Pike and Gibson counties are rounded up to participate.  When I was a very young child, some of those participating were veterans of World War I.  The veterans would line up at the far edge of the cemetery, and seven of them in unison would fire three rifle shots each — a 21-gun salute to the former soldiers who rested in the cemetery. 

Then, and this part always made the adults sniffle, a bugler standing near the rifle-holding line of veterans would loudly play taps.  An unseen, second bugler stationed at the far corner of the cemetery would echo with a second, faint rendition of taps.

When the last note had sounded, as our moms and aunts (and a few dads and uncles too) were dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs, the kids would all bolt over to the line of veterans and scramble around looking for spent rifle shells.  Whoever got the most shells won. 

Back then, I didn’t think much about the little American flags scattered about the cemetery on many of the graves.  It never occurred to me that someone painstakingly put a new little flag on the grave of each deceased veteran each year.   Though I associated the cemetery with death, and knew that there was great sadness in my family over some loved ones who had died young, I didn’t then grasp the significance of this annual ceremony.

Last year, I returned to this cemetery, which is still tranquil and isolated, with my own family.  There, we saw many extended family members, as most of the surrounding community turns out for this ceremony.  Before the 21-gun salute, the leader of the veterans read aloud a list of the names of local soldiers who had been killed in the past year in Iraq or Afghanistan.  After the salute and taps, my own children and the children of my cousins raced around looking for spent shells — oblivious to the gravity of the moment, just as their parents had been 40 years prior.
On Monday, Alexandrians will celebrate another Memorial Day.  To some — not very many I hope — the day will mean nothing more than the three-day holiday weekend that marks the beginning of summer.  Hopefully most people will at least pause to honor deceased veterans. 

Though my family and I will not be traveling to Indiana this year for Memorial Day, I can in my mind’s eye see the ceremony that will take place in that placid graveyard.  I can imagine the children, scrambling for rifle shells while only dimly understanding why the shots were fired.
It is a cliché, one that young children don’t fully comprehend, but one that time has proven true:  freedom really isn’t free.