Memorial Day always hits weird. It feels like an awkward holiday.
We say it’s a day of remembrance, but then we mostly remember sunscreen and that we forgot to defrost the burgers. We do flag emojis, hit some sales, and maybe squeeze out a “thank you for your service” before going back to debating whether pickles belong on hot dogs (FYI, they do!).
But this past Saturday, before the official long weekend kicked off, we got a better kind of reminder.
Our Rotary club rolled up its sleeves alongside the local VFW, a crew from the active-duty Navy, and Aging Resources to spend the day doing actual work for local vets and VA widows. No speeches. No hashtags. Just sweat, tools, and the kind of “you matter” that gets communicated through rakes, ladders, and paint brushes.
We fixed things. Cleaned things. Listened. Hauled. Helped. And let me say this, the people we showed up for were unbelievably grateful. Not for one second did we feel unappreciated or like we were wasting our time.
It’s easy to slap a bumper sticker on your car and call it patriotism. It’s harder to get up early on a Saturday and spend hours repairing someone’s fence because her husband, who served, isn’t here anymore to do it. That’s the work that matters. The quiet, unglamorous kind. The kind that doesn't need an audience to be meaningful.
This Memorial Day, I’m thinking less about “honoring the fallen” in the abstract and more about what it means to carry forward the lives they never got to finish. To keep showing up for the people they left behind. To not treat remembrance like a seasonal trend.
So go ahead, have your BBQ. Enjoy your break. But also remember that service doesn’t end when the uniform comes off, and honoring our soldiers doesn’t have to mean grand gestures.
Sometimes it simply means showing up. Doing the work. Being human.
We’ve got a short video from the Epic Day of Service. It won’t fully capture the conversations, the gratitude, or the "whoops" I had when I accidentally started painting with the wrong paint color, but it gives you a glimpse of what remembering looked like last weekend.
To me, it looked a lot like love and gratitude.
