Vikki and Mark Pier visit the grave of their son, Noah, who was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in July 2011. PHOTO CREDIT: Erin Stalnaker

It’s Memorial Day Weekend, and I am thinking of my mother, who taught me—and our whole family—so much about what Memorial Day means.

I think of her often, of course. Margie Lou Moran, née Goodrich, born July 7, 1922.

In 1940, on the steps of the library at DePaul University, she met our dad, Joseph Thomas Moran Jr, two years older than she. In early 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, he volunteered and went to war. US Army 11th Airborne. Fought in the Philippines and on Okinawa, served in the occupation of Japan, and came home in 1946.

He came home.

So many they knew did not. Their absence defined “The Greatest Generation” as much, if not more, as the presidents and CEOs and famous intellectuals and actors and athletes of their time. They all came home. But they all carried with them the dead of their generation—specifically in memory, or as a kind of climate of loss that shaped the spiritual life of our country for decades. I think it made us closer as a people, more civil.

When my dad came home, they started their family, and made up for any lost time by having ten children. Seven sons, three daughters. “It was so much fun,” Margie Lou kept saying through her tears the night my father died 36 years later. “It was so much fun.”

She had seven sons. And each one of us remember how, on Memorial Day (Veterans Day, too, sometimes), she would tell us the names of the young men she knew who did not come home from World War II, and tell us where they died, and what she knew of the circumstances. “Tommy Curran, shot down over Leyte Gulf.” (That wasn’t one of the names; I don’t recall them now, but that was the feel of the moment.) And as we reached a certain age—19, 20, 21 years old—she would say to us, quietly, maybe more to herself, something like: “Now you are older than Tommy Curran ever was, or ever will be.”

The weight of it. It shaped me and my brothers, just as she intended. And I think of her now, Margie Lou watching as her boys grew up and became young men, and how it made her think of the lads of her youth, “the lads that will never be old”—a line from a poem she loved that she often quoted to us.

Yet we also celebrated Memorial Day, going into town for the local parade, welcoming summer with the rest of the country. She saw no conflict in this. We celebrated the nation and the life that our fallen sons gave their lives to defend and preserve.

And it was natural. It wasn’t some kind of ostentatious advertisement of her patriotism. In some ways, it wasn’t patriotism at all. It wasn’t part of a debate or grievance or tribal declaration. It was life. American life.

She was a Real Patriot, Margie Lou.

Our poem this week is by Archibald MacLeish, whose younger brother Kenneth was killed in World War I. The recording is his own reading of this poem.

—Terry

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe young dead soldiers do not speak.Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:who has not heard them?They have a silence that speaks for them at nightand when the clock counts.They say: We were young. We have died.Remember us.They say: We have done what we couldbut until it is finished it is not done.They say: We have given our lives but until it is finishedno one can know what our lives gave.They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours,they will mean what you make them.They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were forpeace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say,it is you who must say this.We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.