Remembering loved ones at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery: ‘I get a little emotional.’:
Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, scattered with people Saturday, remained a symbol of freedom and sacrifice for many laying flags on Memorial Weekend.
Traditionally, the cemetery is full of Boy Scouts before Memorial Day, as hundreds of Scouts from across the area plant a flag at each headstone, leaving a sea of red, white and blue waving in the wind. This year is different.
“Normally, I’m with the Scouts,” said Jerry Grunzinger of Kirkwood. Grunzinger serves as a scoutmaster, leading troops in activities including the Memorial Day Good Turn. Due to COVID-19, the event was canceled this year. Families are encouraged to lay flags on their own, instead.
Grunzinger said he stopped by to pay respects to his wife’s grandfather, Leo Joseph Unruh, who served in the Navy during WWII.
“I get a little emotional,” Grunzinger said through a wave of tears. “They served the country so, whether they lived a long life or they died during the war, they made the greatest sacrifice.
You know, I have mentioned that I did not travel to St. Louis for a couple years before last autumn, and on the first couple of trips to visit my aunt, I stayed in the St. Charles area–which meant that I did not travel to the south side of St. Louis (the metropolitan area, not the city itself) to visit my mother’s grave in Jefferson Barracks. So when I went “to see Janet Evra,” I had some time in the afternoon before the show, and I cruised down 270. I stopped at the Walmart right off the highway which was my home Walmart when I lived in South County, twenty-some years ago to get some flowers. It was a weird experience along with an acute fear that I would not remember where her grave was.
I rather worked myself up over it, that I had not been a dutiful son in leaving her alone for so long, but in the end, I found it despite how the cemetery has filled in in the passed decade and how the stones are all the same. I know the trash can to park by along with the bin of used flower vases and the right direction to go, and I can usually find her within a minute or two.
I never have this trouble with my father, as he is buried in a small church cemetery in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, far away from his sons now. But I still visit when I’m in town and leave a duck hunting hat. Strangely enough, up until this last autumn, I had been to my father’s grave twice between visits to my mother’s nearer grave.
And, strangely enough, although I get a touch choked up at my mother’s grave, I just get somber at my father’s grave. Whether that’s the time difference–my father has been dead more than half my life, and he was only an occasional figure for another quarter of it, and I saw my mother at least once a week until she got sick and then daily thereafter. Or I’m just a mama’s boy.
At any rate, neither of them died in the service or of a service-related injury, so perhaps it’s not the post for Memorial Day unless there’s a larger lesson in my fear that I might not remember. But probably not.
