Decoration Day

 

Decoration Day

 

Decoration Day. Do you remember it? My grandmother was always sure to put out her flag. It had 48 stars back then.

 

Every year, flags are raised. Mine will go up as well. Flowers are laid gently on graves. The solemn sound of taps echoes across cemeteries from coast to coast. Memorial Day arrives with pageantry and our nation pauses to remember.

But beneath the rituals, America is burdened  with  contradictions buried deeper than its dead.

Few Americans realize that Arlington National Cemetery stands on land once owned by Robert E. Lee. The Union seized his family estate during the Civil War and began burying its fallen in his front yard—a  spiteful message as symbolic as it was strategic: rebellion would not be honored, and its legacy would be rooted beneath the weight of national loss. The very soil of the Confederacy became the bedrock of Union memory.

 

Yet just a year after the war ended, something else quietly bloomed far from Washington.

 

In April 1866, in Columbus, Mississippi, local women walked through a Confederate cemetery, carrying armfuls of flowers. The graves they tended belonged to Southern sons, brothers, husbands. But then, in a quiet, radical act, they crossed to the section where Union soldiers lay—men who had marched into Mississippi as enemies. And they laid flowers there too.

 

It wasn’t political. It was empathy—a mourning wide enough to reach across battle lines. The war had drawn divisions; these women chose to erase them, if only for a moment. Their gesture reached the national press and helped inspire what became known as Decoration Day—a day not born from victory, but from shared grief.

 

The women  imagined a nation where even the graves of enemies could bloom together. At Arlington, the message was different: even the dead would carry a verdict.

 

Today, America still decides how and what to remember. What flags we fly, what statues we keep, what statutes to remove from public display, what stories we pass down—all of it tells us what kind of country we think we are.

 

Take the Confederate flag. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of full-size flags are still sold in the U.S. each year. Some see it as heritage. Others see it as hate. Some claim it’s about pride; others know it’s about pain. That such a symbol continues to sell—160 years after Appomattox—speaks volumes. Not just about history, but about identity. About the lines we continue to draw. About the reckonings we continue to avoid.

 

Memorial Day is still a day of flags and flowers. But it’s also a day to ask: Whose memory matters? What do we choose to sanctify? And can we ever become a country where grief leads us not just to remember, but to reconcile?

What kind of nation do we believe ourselves to be?

And whose graves are we still unwilling to cross?

 

 Memorial Day, Decoration Day—call it what you will, but never forget its purpose: to honor those who gave everything in service to our country.

 

 

Meme: 

Decoration Day, first observed in 1868, gradually became known as Memorial Day, officially renamed by federal law in 1967.