While you dream, all end scene

[sovay]

So now we remember the remembrance, instead of the war itself. Perhaps we should have chosen a different memorial: poppies are the flower of the dead, but also of forgetting, and what with one myth and another they will follow their original function if we are not mindful, which is hard enough to do with the living. Every year I think it's harder. Every year it has to be done.

I feel so restless and un-anchored. We have lived in such an elemental way so long, things here don't look quite right to me somehow; or it may be the consciousness of my so limited time for freedom – so little time to do so many things bewilders me.
—Isaac Rosenberg, 21 September 1917

Comments

[movingfinger]

I was discussing Día de los Muertos with a friend recently and realized there is no commonly-observed holiday for remembrance and commemoration of non-military dead in the US or indeed most of Europe. Nothing like e.g. All Souls'¹ or O-Bon. There are religious observances, but they tend to be individual and not communal.

This may be one reason Día de los Muertos is starting to get traction. It will be interesting to see if ofrendas become more common, if only on a community level. So far the Pinterest side seems to be the point, for average Americans.

¹ All Souls' is observed in Catholic areas but the intensity isn't widespread, as far as I've witnessed.

[sovay]

I was discussing Día de los Muertos with a friend recently and realized there is no commonly-observed holiday for remembrance and commemoration of non-military dead in the US or indeed most of Europe.

Huh. That may be true. I know a few people who are like that about Halloween, but most of them are in it for the licensed spookiness. I happen to belong to a tradition that celebrates yahrzeits, so I am accustomed to remembering the dead without wars, but now that I think about it, I have no idea what non-Jews (or non-Catholics, since you mention All Souls') do.

[movingfinger]

All Souls' has kind of fallen out of use, AFAIK but I would be happy to be corrected. The especially devout might go to Mass, but I doubt that the average nominal Catholic gives it a thought.

Yahrzeits are individual, as I understand it, but they are more used than any other Western remembrance tradition I know of (NOTE CAVEAT THANK YOU). There are specific remembrance days (not widely observed outside of in-groups) for e.g. Holocaust dead, Armenian genocide dead, et al., but the West doesn't have the one big cemetery-visiting day where you go clean up the stones, bring flowers/offerings, and remember. It's individual and personal: the Yahrzeit is slightly more formal and understood in the community, but it's still largely individual.

Something something Protestantism?

[sovay]

All Souls' has kind of fallen out of use, AFAIK but I would be happy to be corrected.

I have no idea. I know it exists in the calendar and I know a couple of people who celebrate it, but I also know the kind of people who attend Tenebrae services.

It's individual and personal: the Yahrzeit is slightly more formal and understood in the community, but it's still largely individual.

Yizkor prayers are communal; they can be said without a minyan, unlike the mourner's Kaddish, but they are meant to be recited with one. There are four opportunities during the year, of which we've just had two in Yom Kippur and Shmini Atzeret. Erev Yom Kippur is also when you light yahrzeit candles for everyone in your family, no matter how long ago they died or at what time of year. Visiting the grave, leaving stones is individual-familial as far as I know, and in my family not tied to the yahrzeit, though that is almost certainly a factor of location.

Something something Protestantism?

Yeah.

[movingfinger]

In America particularly, the twentieth century being as it was, I think one would be hard put to find a family/individual who has known no deceased person who served in the military, so the Memorial Day thing, where the Boy Scouts go tidy cemeteries and put flags on veterans' graves and families bring flower boxes, might gravitationally occupy that space in the national psyche. But it is specifically military.

[sovay]

But it is specifically military.

Extremely so.