Memorial Day Weekend. Before a New Weekend Makes It Irrelevant.

I never shared my amazing Memorial Day weekend with you! I say amazing because Spouse came home to visit!! He has been at BRC for two months and even though that's small potatoes compared with a real deployment, I have missed him so much!  I stopped working last month to start getting everything ready for the move and that's given me a lot more free time.  Unfortunately, that's not something I enjoy when Spouse is gone.

 

Spouse has an odd habit which usually surfaces right after he returns from a deployment or an extended training period.  He re-familiarizes himself with things by saying them out loud.  

I'll catch him staring at me and he'll laugh and say, "You're my wife!".

Or he'll be getting something out of the fridge and I'll hear him say, "This is my house!".

 It is hilarious and random, but also incredibly sweet.

 

 We spent Memorial Day at the beach with several of Spouse's former Marines and a lovely woman whose son was killed in Afghanistan during their deployment.  I was honored to meet her and really taken by her dedication to the Marine Corps and the Marines themselves.  She calls them her "Marine sons". She attends funerals of other fallen service members as an advocate of Gold Star Families, offering families the empathy that only someone who has experienced that scope of loss could understand.

Memorial Day:

 3,000 men and women have died thus far in Operation Enduring Freedom.  And though the number is staggering, it's just a number.  To know that each number was a person, possibly a very young person, each with a life cut short... that is heartbreaking.  When Spouse and I watched the memorial videos honoring some of his comrades in Afghanistan I was struck by how many other, similar videos there are for hundreds of other men and women.  Made by someone, somewhere, who loves and misses them horribly. 

Without a doubt, the longer I have the privilege of being a military wife, the more I grasp what Memorial Day means and how it should be respected.  Because if nothing else, these families need to know that their loved ones aren't forgotten.