Suzy Says

In this holiday-starved nation, where two weeks a year out of 52 is the usual ration of vacation and for many, including me, this is the first long weekend since New Year’s Day, it’s easy to forget the reason we are having it at all. It gets lost in plans for barbecues, sales at the mall, getting away for a much-needed break, the unofficial first weekend of the summer.

But it’s good to take a little time and remember that this day, Memorial Day, is to remember the sacrifices of the men, women, children, and animals who fought for our freedom from the Civil War onward, both at home and abroad.

I am very proud that both of my grandfathers fought in WWI, and am very fortunate that they both survived. My mother’s father, a farm boy from Upstate New York, was the only survivor of his unit. He saw his boyhood friends killed in front of his eyes, yet when the war was over and he had done his duty, had a week in Paris and then was shipped home, back to the farm, as if nothing had happened. No therapy in those days!

My father’s father was a tough little Londoner, 18 when he joined up. He was from a rough part of town, Southwark, which remains so to this day. A few years ago, my father and I went in search of my grandfather’s birthplace, but the area had been heavily bombed during WWII and the only building remaining from the time of my grandfather’s birth were the stables belonging to the railway, long abandoned, along with the graffiti-scarred council housing (projects in American) across the street. It turned out later that the very day we went on this hunt would have been my grandfather’s 100th birthday.

My father’s father became an international banker at Lloyd’s in the City, and did well for himself. Yet he was plagued with depression and nightmares for the rest of his life, which were credited to, or blamed on, his being gassed in WWI. My mother’s father became a highschool principal and he, too, suffered nightmares for the rest of his life, which I learned first-hand since I always slept in a cot in my grandparents’ room when we visited there.

But neither of them thought much of what they did. It was simply what had to be done, the right thing. I’m glad they did, and on this day, I give thanks to all who did the right thing, and never even considered doing otherwise.