Proud Death

Memory is a very strange phenomenon. There is no accounting for what people will remember from their early years. I, for instance, don’t remember a thing about the Cuban Missile Crisis and very little about the arrival of my baby sister, but I can (and do, with rather disturbing frequency) summon a vivid mental picture of Keith Brenner pulling a dirty tissue out of Mrs. Buck’s dress pocket, making a face, and putting it back as she obliviously continues teaching second-grade science.

There are some childhood memories, however, that just about everyone will hold in common for as long as they live. Without a doubt, kids growing up today will remember when the airplanes hit the World Trade Center; an earlier generation will call to mind the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; and, of course, there are those millions of a certain age who can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot.

I can tell you exactly where I was when I heard that President Kennedy had been shot. It is kind of a colorless memory, though, of time and place, with no feelings attached to it—probably because I was too young really to understand what was going on. I will never, ever forget, however, exactly how it felt to stand outside my school soon afterward and see the American flag flying at half-staff. The sight evoked a dark, cold feeling, a certainty that something was deeply wrong, a sense that the world had been somehow knocked off its axis. No one could fail to comprehend the gravity of what had happened and to be deeply impressed when they beheld their great nation’s flag flying low.

I am not sure how many young Americans would share that particular experience these days. Driving through the New England countryside on a recent autumn afternoon, I saw a great number of American flags flying low—and I didn’t know why. At a nearby university, the institutional flag, the state flag, and the American flag were all at half-staff—and I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen them at the tops of their flagpoles. Who had died? Everywhere we went, flags were lowered—in front of schools, on town greens, in people’s yards. What were they for? Had some period of national mourning been declared? Did they have something to do with deaths in Iraq? Had a speeding car full of high schoolers crashed into a bridge abutment? Did the third selectman suddenly keel over from an aortic aneurysm? Who knows? With so many possibilities, who would even have the time or the resources to find out?

It seems the solemn and portentous observance of lowering the flag has been extended from great Americans and the occasional foreign dignitary to Americans in general. We all merit the honor, merely on account of having died. And so the flags fly at half-staff all the time, because people die all the time; and rather than being struck somber by a rare and awesome sight, for the most part we don’t even notice anymore.

We seem, in fact, to be embracing in recent years a culture of undifferentiated public death. Municipalities bicker endlessly over putting up memorials to this or that fatal event, or naming a building or a tunnel or a garden after this or that fallen resident. Makeshift shrines promiscuously dot the roadsides at scenes of car accidents that might have happened last week or last year or five years ago. Children are permitted—perhaps even encouraged—to congregate for days on the lawns of the families of lost classmates, with media arriving periodically to photograph them as they weep copiously in each other's arms. Loved ones die, and their survivors immediately launch themselves into crusades for or against or in honor of something the deceased believed in or was afflicted by.

It is all intended to honor the dead, to lend meaning to their ending, but I think that it does quite the opposite. We litter the landscape with rotting flowers and trinkets sodden by rain and snow, left behind like old tag sale signs. We leave to the ages monuments to doers of forgotten or trivial deeds. We avoid paying to those whom we have lost the tribute of our undiluted sorrow by sublimating our grief to the intensive activity of mounting a cause. We draw attention to the homes of people who want to be left alone with their anguish. The private becomes public, and the public is fragmented into innumerable small pockets of bereavement, trying to make common an experience of deaths that we do not hold in common.

And no longer do we pull up short at the sight of a lowered flag, catch our breath, and think, as we last did in September six years ago, that something rare and terrible has happened to our country, and that we must stop for a moment and bow our heads—and then raise them again, together, to go on with life.

—Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Editor