Today is Veterans Day. Everyone should at at least a moment to reflect on the sacrifices made by our armed forces and their families. Military.com lists many of the events commemorating the holiday.
We’ve all heard of the Unknown Soldier, but what about a soldier whose remains are unclaimed. Thomas Young Behrens served honorably in Vietnam, but when he died recently at the Perry Point Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Maryland, no one presented themselves to claim his body. As the Cecil Daily Whig reports, the center, and a local funeral home, made sure he did not die unremembered. He was laid to rest accompanied by dozens of mourners. This was not a one-time event. According to Fred Zellman, a funeral director who staged the burial, “we don’t know the reasons why, but it happens more than what it should,” He is also working to put together a database so no member of our military is sent to their final resting place unremembered.
The Sutherland Springs, Texas shooting continues to reverberate. This New York Times story is heartbreaking—the cemetery where most of the town’s dead are interred is having trouble burying all the victims. As Cardenas-Lomas, the head of the town’s cemetery board, told the paper, they usually bury only 15 people a year; the 26 killed at the First Baptist Church is putting a strain on their facilities. A funeral director is having to call as far as Dallas for hearses, the cemetery is trying to schedule the services so the funerals don’t all happen at one time. And the psychic toll is being felt throughout the town. “Rural cemeteries in Texas like the one in Sutherland Springs are as much a space for the living as for the dead,” said Ana Juárez, an anthropologist at Texas State University, says. As Ms. Cardenas-Lomas, said “This feels like a terrifying, crushing nightmare except that I’m somehow awake.”
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