Today we said a final farewell to my grandfather. Having served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army during WWII, he was eligible to have his ashes inurned in the Columbarium at Arlington National Cemetery. When we were kids, Granddad never talked about the army, or the time he spent in Africa during the war. When we got older and he showed us the pictures he had kept from that time, although he could name all of the soldiers whose faces looked out at us from the faded black and whites, he had very few stories to share. I’m not sure if he thought we wouldn’t be interested, or if he just chose not to recall the details of that period of his life.
The stories my grandfather did tell were anecdotes from Arlington National Cemetery. That place was alternately his pride and joy and his greatest burden. You see, he worked for twelve years as the Facilities Manager at ANC, which meant any time someone needed preparations for an upcoming event or a solution for a middle-of-the-night crisis, Granddad got the call. His responsibilities were varied, from maintaining roads, to fixing electrical glitches, to supervising movie crews, to planning new construction (including the Columbarium in which his ashes now rest). Once during a torrential summer rainstorm, Granddad had to go relight the eternal flame at the Kennedy gravesite—the call to report its outage had come all the way from Japan! (Granddad figured a Japanese tourist noticed it and called home to tell friends and relatives, “You’ll never believe what I just saw.…”)
In my heart, I believe it was his service to the cemetery and not his service to our country during the war that prompted Granddad’s wishes to be buried in Arlington. He could have still received military honors had he chosen to be buried in the family cemetery on the Eastern Shore. But for twelve years, Arlington was his family, demanding his time, his energy, his attention and his affection, just like a child. Looking through the pillars of the Columbarium, across the endless rows of pristine white headstones while the bugler played Taps, the riflemen fired their 21-gun salute, and the chaplain presented the folded flag to Granddad’s wife, I felt Arlington open its arms to welcome my grandfather and return all the love he had invested there. Granddad has gone home.
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