Memorial Day

Growing up in America, I never paid much attention to "Memorial Day." I don't even think I knew what it memorialized until I was a teen-ager. Here in Israel, Memorial Day is observed with intense dignity. Places of entertainment are closed, and the media are full of articles about soldiers recently killed and about those who died two generations ago.
Naturally, although Asher did not die as a soldier, I felt much more empathy this year for bereaved parents than I ever felt before.
I don't know whether it's easier to lose a son in military action than it is to lose a son in an accident (How could such a thing be measured?). Each person's death is an individual event. Some young soldiers die heroically, others died because of carelessness, stupidity, or simple bad luck - just as with civilians.
Military deaths are institutionalized, public. The victims are buried in special cemeteries with flags and honor guards and speeches by officers. Civilian deaths are normally private.
If Asher had to die, I'm just as glad that his funeral was family business and not official.
Would I have been proud of him, if he'd died heroically in his country's service? I don't think the pain would have been any less. The pride would have been bitter.
What I understood more than ever this year (and I even think about this when I see fictional
killings in a film or on television) is the effect that these deaths have on all the people who knew and loved the victims: every soldier who died in action had parents, probably siblings, a partner or spouse, even children.
When I say that I understood it more this year, that isn't to say that I never thought about it in the past. One of my young friends lost his father in an army accident when he was an infant, and I've often thought of how hard it was for him and his mother. My daughter's sister-in-law lost her husband in the first Lebanon War, leaving her with a two-year-old boy and pregnant with a girl never even seen by her father.
Where does one take all these heavy emotions and thoughts?
We'll never have a world where people don't die untimely deaths, of accidents, disease, or violence. Perhaps we can have a world where people are kinder to themselves and to others - the bereaved and the not yet bereaved.