A truly Happy Memorial Day story

I experienced my first American Memorial Day a few years ago, during the months my friend and I spent in Los Angeles. I was working as a production assistant on a film shoot based up in Valencia, he was working illegally maintaining a website for a couple of Israelis down in the valley. Our LA adventure had turned to labor; we lived from our jobs to the mattresses laid out on our floor and back to our jobs again. On weekends we went grocery shopping. We never met a soul other than our coworkers.

When the three day weekend came upon us, we were desperate for a vacation from what should have been our vacation. We found a cheap hotel room in Vegas and drove out in the morning. It was only on the highway that our Memorial Day excursion turned to a hallucination, as we drove by signs that read “Happy Memorial Day!”

Israel is a country with a rich culture of grief. We live with it nearly every day, and then on two days of the year, Holocaust Day and Memorial Day, we soak ourselves in mourning. Children growing up in Israel are yanked out of their bliss and into the world of death twice a year at least, barring any personal tragedy. Memorial Day is a day of somber ceremonies, soul-wrenching documentaries, sad songs on the radio, white buttoned shirts with stickers bearing the image of red flowers pressed against hearts and, finally, a frightening siren sounding across the entire land to which everyone stands in respect of the fallen. This siren produces the iconic Israeli image of hundreds of cars stopped on a highway with their drivers standing beside them, their hands at their sides and their chins to their chests, thinking of death. The grandiosity is reminiscent of the images Spielberg implements in many of his films, except in this case all eyes are shut and none stare up in awe.

The English language has a word for a child who’s lost his parents, but no word for a parent who’s lost a child. The Hebrew language has one. Words are born out of necessity.

The words “Happy Memorial Day!” flashed by us on a highway leading to Las Vegas and hit me in the gut. My friend and I laughed at their absurdity, shook our heads and commented about how insane that combination would sound in Hebrew, but inside me I was not amused, I was shocked. Those words remain the most evil and decadent oxymoronic phrase I have ever read. I never expected an entire nation as vast as the United States to walk around in forced mourning for a day; the imposed grief had bothered me even as a child in the tiny country of Israel, where death is never more than two degrees of separation away. But to place the word “happy” before “memorial day” showed such irreverence, an utter draining of the meaning of words. It scared me.

On our second night in Vegas we ate at a buffet constructed to look like a Parisian courtyard, complete with fake blue skies on the ceiling. While my friend stepped away to refill his plate, a California-blond woman in her thirties, drunk or crazy or most likely both, started talking to me. She sat alone at a table adjacent to ours. There was a palpable sad quality about her.

She heard that I was working on a film shoot and became excitable. She told me all about her dog; she had been forced to give him away to some millionaire film producer who lived on a hill. I remember her dog had a full name; a first name, a last name and a middle name. I asked her if his last name was the same as hers but she said no, of course not. We aren’t related, she said. She had had to give the dog away to this rich man for some reason she wouldn’t share, but they were going to meet one another on a nearby hill every other weekend, she and the dog. He would run away and find her at their spot; that was their arrangement. Their first meeting was a week away. “I’m so excited to see him!” She lit up. “Think of all the stories he’ll have to tell me, living with that millionaire.”

My friend returned and gave me an excuse to pry myself away from her. We spent the rest of our time in Vegas alone surrounded by the masses that flooded the strip on Memorial Day weekend. That night I deeply regretted leaving that woman, with her crazy story of loneliness. I reprimanded myself that I should have overcome my own character and gleefully taken advantage of her frail insanity. My friend told me “No way. You don’t need that kind of insane woman. You’ve got nothing to regret here.”

A couple of hours later I forgot what she looked like. Just like I’d forgotten what the words “Memorial Day” actually meant. Or the word “happy”, for that matter.