Who Should We Honor on Memorial Day?

In 1866, four women placing spring flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers at Friendship Cemetery in Columbus, Miss., noticed that the nearby graves of Union soldiers were barren. They took it upon themselves to decorate those, too.

Lately I have been thinking about those women as Memorial Day approaches. Their decision to expand the notion of whom they chose to remember lies at the heart of what Memorial Day should be about. For those women in Mississippi, the Union soldiers, enemies in a war that divided not only a nation but also families and left some 750,000 dead, also deserved respect and flowers.

Their gesture, memorialized by F.M. Finch’s poem “The Blue and the Gray” in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867, was one of numerous expressions of remembrance around the country after the Civil War that gave rise to what today is Memorial Day. The United States has set aside the day to remember, honor and salute our fallen service members. But not all of those we should recognize fit neatly into that box.

Take, as an example, some of the first U.S. deaths in World War I: Edith Ayres and Helen Burnett Wood, two Army nurses killed by shrapnel when a naval gun exploded during target practice while they were traveling by Navy ship to Europe. They were Red Cross nurses who were inducted into the Army, serving without rank or commission, since women’s status as soldiers was not yet settled. They probably are not among those who spring to mind when we imagine American military deaths in that war, yet they made the ultimate sacrifice in service to the nation while on their way to save lives.