We can't remember their sacrifice

The flash of white pulled me away from the conversation as I refocused on the rows of crosses along the countryside. The uniformity and precise alignment of the memorials announced a military cemetery, where rank and wealth lose their earthly status and every grave is equalized by the last full measure of devotion.

The incursion on the landscape was ours, the Florence American Cemetery, final resting place of 4,392 troops who would never return from their battles in Italy. Tomorrow, at 11 a.m., the cemetery will host a sparsely-attended memorial in former enemy territory, honoring men and women with no one to mourn their passing.

A relative handful left children behind when they shipped out, but most graves represent a dead end, the severed limb of a family tree. I’m here because my dad made it home, passing on his ancestors’ legacy to new generations. At the Florence American Cemetery, like all military cemeteries, the graves overflow with both their physical occupants and the multitudes who will never know the beauty of sunrise.

Most cemeteries tell the stories of families that make an area their home long enough to raise new generations and memorialize their eldest. Wander through any cemetery and it’s not too hard to see which families have been in the area for multiple generations, which ones did well financially, who reached their three-score-and-ten…and who did not. Military cemeteries in former war zones defy that norm. Each grave is a memorial of one, a life disconnected from family and an interment with ceremony, but no mourners.    

I was overwhelmed as I took in the sight, wholly incapable of absorbing the lost potential in the cul de sac of war. I felt grateful, but probably not grateful enough, for the accidents of fate that spared my father, and me. I searched the archives and found a Robert Rosenbaum, one who didn’t make it home, in the Brittany American Cemetery in France. He came from Pennsylvania with the 175th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, and achieved the rank of staff sergeant on his path to eternity. He died August 9, 1944, close to the time that my dad, the other Robert Rosenbaum, was shipping out. Only one of them came home.

As the Florence American Cemetery receded into the way-back and the sight of vineyards reclaimed my vision, I felt immensely grateful. Beyond the appreciation for the vacation I was on and the opportunities ahead, I was suddenly humbled by the fact I am alive at all. Along the same road I was traveling, literally, thousands of unborn souls grieved in eternal silence.

That’s the contradiction of Memorial Day. Almost all of us who recall the victims are not their descendants, while the true heirs of the legacy were never born to observe it at all.  For all but a few among the dead, no one will tell the story, share a memory, say a prayer.

One minor opportunity to commemorate their sacrifice is to visit the American Battle Monuments Commission website and find someone who shares a name with a friend or relative who made it home, or look for a distant relative whose story ended in sacred honor. It isn’t much, but it’s something.
 
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