Tag: families

Wreaths Across America

  
The rows of white stones march out and out across the neatly clipped grass, each stone marks a grave, each grave marks a soldier, or family member, who has passed. I’ve stood at Arlington National Cemetery and wept at the endless rows of headstones, but I didn’t know that there was another cemetery much closer to home where the uniform white stones march out and out. Jefferson Barracks Cemetery was established in about 1827 and made a National Cemetery in 1866, when the National Cemetery Administration was established. It’s just down the road here in St. Louis.  
I’ve seen it twice this year, the first at the funeral of my sister’s father of record, and the second on the day when Wreaths Across America invites people to join them at cemeteries like Arlington and Jefferson Barracks to honor those who have paid the ultimate price for our country. Wreaths Across America is a charity that receives no money from the government, it’s all donations from people like you and me. Jonathon, Genevieve, Spike, and myself went expecting we’d be there for hours helping lay wreaths, but unfortunately there were so few wreaths that everyone in attendance was asked to only take one, or two, so that everyone there could lay at least one wreath on a grave. 

  
A news story on CNN about Arlington National Cemetery not having enough wreaths to cover all the graves this year was what first brought Wreaths Across America to our attention. We even donated to the cause, as did many others, and it was enough so that Arlington was able to put a wreath on every grave this year. They said in the interview that most cemeteries were embraced by their local town, because so many local military were buried there, but Arlington was made up of soldiers that weren’t local, so the surrounding area didn’t feel connected enough to contribute. The interview made us think that here in St. Louis there would be enough wreaths to go around, but there was not.
In fact, there were only about 1,100 wreathes to go on the 180,000 graves. It was upsetting to see all the bare white tombstones, and the few evergreen wreaths. I guess a few was better than none, but it still seemed sad, and left all of us feeling like we need to do better next year. I’ll say it here and now, that we plan to contribute more next year and would like to have a goal of honoring many more of our fallen soldiers next year by helping our local Wreaths Across America.  

  
The other interesting thing about the ceremony was that it was full of speeches where people talked about this country with unabashed patriotism and pride. There was no apologizing, or over explaining, or any of the language that has crept into so many politicians and citizen’s speeches lately. It harkened back to when I was a child. I was taught to be proud to be American and that it was the best country in the world to call home. You know what, I still believe that. I’ve visited several other countries and they are all wonderful in their own right, but they aren’t home. I don’t believe our country is perfect, but then the same is true of every other country. I sat there and thought, here is an entire group of people of diverse race, religion, economics, and age, but we were all there to honor the ideal that we are still the home of the brave, and the land of the free, and that last part, freedom, came with a price that the men and women lying dead around us had paid. I will not apologize for honoring the dead of my country and it was wonderfully freeing to be in such a large group of people that felt the same way.  
Let me say, that if you disagree with me, that’s okay, because something else I was taught as a child was this, America is about being free to believe, to worship, to vote, to have an opinion that is your own. I may not agree with you, or you with me, but I will fight for your right to have your own opinion and beliefs, as you are supposed to fight for my right. We are supposed to fight for each other, not against each other. We can disagree vehemently, and it’s okay if our opinions anger each other, but we are still supposed to honor each other’s right to those opinions. That is what it means to be free in America. We are free to believe, to speak, to worship, to study, to work, to create as we will, and the government will not stop us, or arrest us for it. I don’t think most Americans realize how rare that is in the world.  
Spike walked out among the white lines of graves in his uniform. He had been thanked for his service by several people, and thanked others in return. He still doesn’t like being too visible in the blog, but as a combat vet himself, he felt it was important to show his respect. We missed the opportunity for donating enough to Wreaths Across America to cover the graves at Jefferson Barracks, but there is always next year. The dead are patient and they’ll wait, but for the living veterans and their families it’s harder to wait. The dead have all the shelter they will ever need, they do not know hunger or thirst, sorrow or terror, the cold does not move them, illness and injury are things of the past for the dead, but there are living veterans and their families that need shelter, food, medical care, and just to know that their sacrifices aren’t in vain. Here are just a few charities that try to help the men and women who served in our armed forces, and their famili 

Home

Hope for the Warriors

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Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America

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USO

https://www.uso.org/

Father’s Day 2015

​The photo with this blog is of my husband, Jonathon, and our daughter, Trinity. Sometimes I forget how very small she was when I divorced and was suddenly dating again. Jonathon was the only boyfriend I ever introduced her to, because he was the only one I was ever serious about. I think we married within a year of this picture. My second, his first, and he became a stepdad before he was ever a dad. He became Daddy-Jon because Trinity wanted a way to keep her two dads separate when she talked about them, so it was Daddy-Jon and Daddy-G. Trinity truly feels she has two fathers, and Jon felt that he had a great kid and there was no need for a second one, because biology doesn’t make you a dad. Being there daily makes you a dad. Jonathon watched the Barbie Nutcracker movie twelve times in a row when Trinity had the flu once. Only a parent does that for his sick kid. He taught her how to fence using boffer weapons so that she was so deadly in stage combat at drama camp that she had to bow out. “The other girl just kept dropping her guard, mom, I couldn’t help myself.” A dad is the person who comes limping in with the limping child after that infamous bicycle riding lesson. A dad is all that and so much more.

  
It is through watching first my ex, and then Jonathon, with Trinity that I began to understand what a father does because I never had one of my own. I was a fatherless child, and by age six I was a motherless one, too. My grandmother raised me without any men around the house, so I had no clue what a father, or a husband for that matter, was supposed to do. I always felt very left out on this holiday as a child. I think it was one of the reasons I worked hard to make sure my ex stayed invested in Trinity’s life, so that she had two dads where I’d had none. The three of us even went to parent-teacher conferences for Trinity. There was no fighting amongst us at school events, because my ex-husband and I both agreed that our daughter didn’t divorce anyone, that was us, so we vowed never to bad mouth each other in front of her and to act like civilized grownups at school functions or anything that involved our child. I am happy to say that with almost no exceptions we accomplished that. Was it easy? No. Was it worth it for our kid? Yes.
Trinity is twenty now, but she still has two dads for Father’s Day. I’ve now watched dear friends dance with their fathers at their weddings, and thanks to Genevieve and her father, I’m learning that even when you’re very grownup, a dad is still important to a daughter. Thanks to Jonathon and Spike I’m learning about sons and fathers, too. A dad is someone you can turn to for advice, someone you just want to keep involved in your life, because you love them.
People keep asking me why I haven’t shown my fictional character Anita Blake on stage with her dad, and the honest answer is because I didn’t know what a dad was for, or how a grown child interacts with one. I would take my character Jason back to visit his father in Blood Noir, but that father was dying of cancer and their relationship was strained at best, so it didn’t really force me to show a healthy father/child relationship. Then in Affliction we went back home with Micah and it was his father who was dying in the hospital of a mysterious disease. Micah loved his father, but the dad spent most of the book unconscious, so I didn’t have to deal with it on stage much. It would take me a year after I wrote Affliction and had fans complaining that I had another father in hospital like Jason’s father, before I both realized that it was similar and understood why I’d done it. The short answer is that I don’t know what a father is for, and I certainly don’t know what a healthy father/daughter relationship is supposed to be. I realize now that is why Anita’s family has never been on stage. I don’t know what a family is for like that, not a dad-mom-sibling kind of family, because I never had one of those. Maybe as Trinity gets older, I’ll understand it more. Maybe watching Jonathon, Spike, and Genevieve interact with their families as adults will help me understand what it’s supposed to be like to be a grown woman that still has a relationship with their family of birth – the family that raised them.