We didn’t “celebrate” Memorial Day in our house while I was growing up. There were no barbecues, no sporting events, no over-the-top parades or the customary Memorial Day fare. We would go to a roping, have our orange Nehis, nachos, and Big League Chew or Bazooka bubble gum, then we would go home. I never asked why we didn’t do what everyone else did.

I am the daughter of a Vietnam vet. Even typing that opens the floodgates- tears, emotions, memories. My daddy is my hero. I have seen his pain and felt his torment and guilt. From learning very young not to wake him suddenly to seeing him crippled with bouts of malaria, from his anger at the boys in third grade making fun of my not having fingers as a result of his Agent Orange exposure to his reverence of The Flag, I have borne witness to the meaning behind Memorial Day through his losses- things he couldn’t change and those he couldn’t bring back, including himself.

I thought of this earlier as I pinned on my beloved poppy pin for today’s Memorial Day ceremony. The only memory I have of my father acknowledging Memorial Day is of a wire and fabric poppy from the Legion gentleman at the door of the land of Walmartians, its petals so flimsy that it hung from a rosary in my Camaro for a year or so before I finally had to take it out or risk its inevitable disintegration.

I started collecting poppies with that first little fabric bud, to the point that there isn’t a room in my house without them. That first poppy was so much stronger than the fraying red nylon of which it was made. It signified that my pop was healing. That was when I started to understand:

We didn’t observe Memorial Day because my daddy COULDN’T remember. So I will remember for him.