Monday was here in the United States a national holiday—Memorial Day, perhaps the most removed from its origins of any of our ‘secular’ holy days, marking more the start of the summer vacation season than anything else. It was a beautiful day in our corner of the Appalachians, dramatically different from last year: where last year we went out looking for some cold mountains creeks in which to escape the already sweltering heat, it was downright cool this last weekend, the nights positively chilly. We didn’t do anything special, as I’d already taken a day off the week before so I spent most of the day working as usual. A little before dinner, though, I took the kids across the nearby county road to the little cemetery that sits on the side of the ridge, a couple hundred yards from our house. Before walking over I explained to them that today was Memorial Day—which started out as ‘Decoration Day’—and it was a custom to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. We gathered flowers from our garden and headed up the ridge, then found the two graves of World War One soldiers, both of whom returned from the war but died shortly thereafter, almost certainly from wounds sustained in the conflict (the flu influenza that wrapped around the end of the war no doubt not helping). Perhaps not war dead in the most technical sense, but the war still killed them, just on a slight delay.
The children did not request any further explanations as to why were decorating the graves of the war dead, and I realized as we walked up the ridge and listened to their chatter with one another that they had automatically connected this practice with the Orthodox custom of decorating the ‘Tomb’ of Christ, the wooden bier that holds a special icon, the epitáphios (also known as an epitáphion), depicting the Body of Christ after the crucifixion. Vera helped decorate our parish’s Tomb this year, having picked flowers from our garden and from the woods out back of church; we also helped remove the dried flowers and deposit them in the compost pile. It is surely one of the most beautiful of Orthodox traditions, tying directly back to the actions of the Myrrhbearing Women of the Gospel accounts, whose own loving labor runs genealogically back to the beginnings of humanity—the care of the dead being one of the strongest archeological signals of ‘modern’ humans.1
And so it was intuitive to the children that we would take a day to decorate the tombs of some special dead—though they were not overly curious as to why the war dead are the ‘special dead,’ though we will in time have those conversations. We read the names and descriptions of the two young men and laid our little bouquets of flowers in front of their headstones and prayed for their peace and repose. My daughter asked me if they were good men, and I said I did not know. I did not mention what these men almost certainly would have experienced in the ‘Great War,’ the destruction that gas worked on a man’s lungs, the horrible dismemberments that shrapnel and shell inflicted, or that it’s a good bet these men came back home wounded in body and spirit, like so many other young men of their generation.
No, I do not know if they were good men or brave men, though I’d like to think there were both, at least when it mattered. I do know that in a very real way they are our ancestors, the world in which we live was built at the cost of their bodies and blood and of a hundred million others ground up in the machinery of the twentieth century. Like so many other Southern men, black and white, like so many men (and, if generally in different roles, women) across this country and across the globe, they were thrown into a war about which they probably had only vague notions, with an even vaguer sense of its meaning. And yet it transformed their worlds—while also often cutting their lives prematurely short—and the world of every human being subsequent. Platitudes about ‘freedom’ and the rest aside, the war dead truly are our war dead: their bodies and souls were given up, willingly and unwillingly, in the crucial bright hot points of modern history, their human sacrifices upon the altar of global war the wellspring of the modern world, in all its good, bad, and ugliness. We wouldn’t be here were it not for them, and so we and they are linked together. The obligation of care is one deeper than that of nationalism or militarism, the attitudes with which holidays like Memorial Day are often linked and which they often reinforce. The hetereogeneous historical roots of ‘Decoration Day’ reach into something older and deeper and more profound, holy even, something expressed in the work of care of the Myrrhbearing Women: the various local ‘decoration days’ in the American South that precede the national holiday were almost all marked by the decoration of the graves of the Confederate and Union war dead, an act of fundamentally human care, not an expression of patriotic triumph or of nostalgia for the ‘lost cause.’
The care and commemoration of the dead, war or otherwise, can take on many guises and be driven by many impulses: it can be an expression of nationalism and militarism, a prelude to the making of more war dead; it can be an attempt to placate the hungry ghosts of the ancestors, to constrict the dangerous spirits and memories of the dead, to charge a political cult of memory; or it can be an expression of grief and of love, of kinship cutting across the chasm of death, of the unity of humankind even in the end of biological life. It is this sort of care and commemoration of the dead that is among the most profound acts of love, a type of gift-giving that expects nothing in return, that mourns the loss of a human person as a person, as a source and receiver of love and not as a means or a de-personalized object.
While the Holy Myrrhbearing Women were making their way to annoint the crucified Body of Christ in the tomb, Christ’s male disciples were hiding, afraid that they too would meet the same end, no doubt mourning the sudden and dramatic collapse of their imagined political project—the overthrow of their enemies and the institution of the Messianic Kingdom on earth. I do not know if Jesus’ women disciples harbored such political hopes or not, but regardless the loss of such a vision was not what they mourned. They mourned the loss of their friend, of a fellow human being whose body deserved love and care even in death. They no more anticipated the Resurrection than did the men. They expected no reward, no political offices or positions of power in a coming kingdom. Theirs was a literal labor of love as old as the human race itself, an expression of the goodness and possibility latent and expressed within humanity, even amidst the horror and evil manifest in humanity and as expressed in Christ’s Passion upon the Cross.
It’s a cliché, though still true, to say that contemporary people in much of the Western world prefer to avoid the dead and the dying as much as possible, to apportion the final days of life away from view, to dispose of dead bodies as quickly and hygenically as possible. The care of the dead is at most something a few people undertake on national holidays—cemeteries are not, for most people, regular destinations. We are not totally unique in this aversion, it’s worth noting, as there have been times and places in which the proximity of the dead was avoided. But in the great sweep of human history, at least insofar as we can reconstruct it, we are outliers. The people of the early town of Çatalhöyük buried their familial dead under the raised platforms of their houses, probably in continuity with Paleolithic practices of keeping the dead close to significant sites of frequent use or residence. Other peoples at the dawning of sedentary life kept the skulls of ancestors on display in their homes. The practices have changed over time, shaped by material resources, political power and stratification, and all the rest, but that fundamental drive for connectivity, that sense that the dead remain worthy of respect and care, has persisted. It culminates and finds its fulfillment in the care shown by the women disciples for the Crucified Lord, their devotion and expression of the depths of human distinction and goodness leading them to encounter the Risen Lord.
Decoration Day, then, and other opportunities, formal or informal, for the care of our dead—and we have many dead, our ancestors after the flesh and the spirit, ancestors after the troubled and tangled histories of which we are heirs, the sins and sorrows and triumphs from which we collectively descend—ought to be taken, in light of the deep history and meaning contained in such acts, and in light of the hope of the Resurrection heralded by those women of the first century.
It is true that Neanderthals, and perhaps other humans besides our own species but contemporary with H. sapiens, almost certainly buried their dead with something like ritual actions and deposits—but I do not see a problem with understanding H. neanderthalensis as part of ‘modern’ humanity, though that is a question for another day. While it remains a disputed question, the image of the Neanderthal inhabitants of Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan burying their dead with flower bouquets is truly moving and beautiful (and may well prove to have been the case, see this recent article).