Five years into my mission for Mom

Mom’s body began winding down about five years ago, though her spirit had been ready to go for a while. I sat with her and held her hand, telling her Dad was waiting to take it on the other side.

We had a graveside service in Collierville, Tennessee, where her mom was from. The family plot was full, so we buried her beside it on an old carriage path, end to end with my stepfather. 

Then I set about keeping my promise: I’d get Dad moved to Arlington National Cemetery, where he should have been all along. Mom always regretted her shellshocked decision to bury him in a private cemetery a few miles from the home where she raised my sister and me.

My first memory is of a parade grounds near Arlington, watching Mom receive the medals that later hung on our wall. She would point them out to me by name: Navy Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart. Then she’d add her version of scripture: “Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.”

Dad was seventeen when he enlisted. He was thirty-six when he was killed. Because he risked his life, he didn’t make it home—but a lot of other men did.

“Especially on medevac, I feel so doggone obligated to go do something for them,” he explained on a reel-to-reel tape he sent home from Vietnam. “I know if I was laying on the field and dying, man, I’d like to see that old helicopter come in.”

For fifty-three years Mom couldn’t listen to his tapes or read his letters. She couldn’t talk about him without crying. I’d spent my life watching her struggle, her life shaped by his absence like one of those trees you can drive a car through.

How hard can it be, I thought, bringing their story to a proper close?

I called Arlington and was told they only work with funeral homes. The young woman at the funeral home in Memphis apologized—she’d have to do some research.

“No hurry,” I told her. “I’ve already waited fifty-three years.”

By January 2020, we had a plan to exhume my father’s remains and transport them to Arlington. Then Covid hit and everything ground to a halt.

In 2021 I called the funeral home again. The young woman had been replaced by a young man. He called Arlington and called me back. Per cemetery code, he said, my father couldn’t be buried there because a military marker had been placed for him elsewhere.

I called Arlington. The bureaucrat I spoke with wouldn’t budge.

My only option was to get one of my federal representatives involved. That’s where I got stuck.

I had two US senators and one congressman, all supporters of a former president who had called captured and killed American soldiers “suckers” and “losers”; who couldn’t be bothered to visit the graves of American soldiers in France because it was raining; who had stood in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day and remarked, “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?”

All three of my federal representatives supported a former president who’d tried to subvert the Constitution he’d sworn to defend. They’d sworn to defend it too. So had my father. He was the only one of the five who kept that promise.

My middle daughter encouraged me to call our congressman. By now it was late 2022, and she’d just run for Congress twice because she didn’t want him running unopposed.

“I’m sure he would help. He likes showing up at military things.” I think that’s the way she put it.

I knew he did. Ugly as it sounds, I didn’t want him showing up at ours. It took me another year to get over myself.

Since 2023, I’ve been working with my congressman’s military liaison. He’s courteous and responsive; I suspect he’s been at the job a long time. Sometimes I wonder if he stops and thinks about what he does in light of who my congressman supports and what the Republican Party has become. Can’t he see that none of this is normal?

That said, when I email him I act like everything’s normal too.

He’s helped me clear bureaucratic hurdles. It took quite some time to determine that I could comply with Arlington code simply by having the original marker removed, and then more time to get military documentation that my father was in good standing when he was killed in action. Now I need a court order from somebody—nobody’s sure who—to have his remains exhumed.

Once I clear that hurdle, we can set a date with Arlington. The wait is several months long. They’re always adding to those undulating white rows.

So many risks taken, so many lives lost, so many families shattered. So many promises kept to keep the beautiful promise of this imperfect country.

So many powerful people willing to squander it all.

My mission feels more urgent than it felt five years ago.

Saving American democracy starts at the state level. Please join my campaign. Click to donate, volunteer, or get a yard sign.

Allison
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