Gold Star

The people who make Memorial Day hit home. A family that stays with me.

Right after my brother died, I started working as a hospice chaplain. Weird work for someone mired in grief. I was pretty sure I had nothing to offer anyone.

Don was my secret favorite hospice patient. He was hard of hearing, grouchy, forgetful at times and sharp when he wanted to be. He was so modest that he asked the home health aide to give him a shower with his underwear on.

One day his daughter Rose visited, and was feeling reflective. She told me about her Christmas Eve, sitting on the couch with a glass of wine when there was a knock on the door. The knock revealed two men in uniform, the sight every military family dreads.

Her son Mike had been killed that Christmas Eve in Iraq. The family stumbled through a funeral mass, and then a memorial service held by his unit, out of state. “I feel like we buried that child so many times,” she said. “At the end I was so tired.”

Her story of his sudden, violent death recalled my brother's death, and I felt a silent connection with her story. My dad asked me one night, “Isn't it hard to visit other people when David's death is on your mind?” No. Yes. It's all I know how to do, I tell him.  

Don was on hospice for two years, declining, bouncing back, and then slipping again. When the end came, I went to see him every afternoon. Walking up the driveway, I would see the car with the Gold Star Family license plate and know that Rose was there, too.

Again, she told me about her son’s death. One grief evokes another, and she shared more details this time. Mike was married briefly, and it didn't work out. Because of the timing of the divorce, when Mike died, the Army called the young ex-wife first. Her dad, drunk, called Rose and her husband. Her husband couldn’t understand anything he was saying, except that Mike was dead.

Rose ran upstairs to her computer and frantically, crazily hit the buttons, searching for the Army’s emergency family number. She found it and screamed into the phone. Outside, a white sedan turned the corner, and moved slowly up their block. She watched the car drive through the snow until it stopped in front of her house, and two men got out.

Pausing in the story, she looked at me and asked, “Are you crying?”

“I am,” I admit. I have no professional composure.

“You're sweet to cry at my story,” she tells me.

There are no awards in this marathon of grief. No gold star. We mark the way so no one is forgotten, when remembering is the only form of love left to give. Memorial Day is that obligation, and that gift.