05/25/2026
Memorial Day carries a weight that is often misunderstood. It is not Veteran’s Day. Today is not simply about service. It is about sacrifice.
As families gather for barbecues, lake days, and long weekends together, I hope we also pause to remember the men and women who never made it home. The freedoms we enjoy today were paid for by lives willingly laid down in service to this country. Their absence is the reason we are able to live in freedom.
Memorial Day began after the Civil War, originally called Decoration Day, when grieving communities gathered to place flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers and pray over the unimaginable loss left behind by war. In 1868, Major General John A. Logan declared May 30 a national day of remembrance for those who died in battle. What began as a tribute to Civil War soldiers eventually became a day honoring every American who gave their life in military service.
This day became deeply personal in my own family history. The images shared here are from a gathering of images of my grandparents’s airmen brothers from Moore Airfield and in the European Theatre, where my grandfather trained and became a decorated World War II pilot. He kept photographs of the men he trained beside and carefully tracked where each was stationed. If he learned a plane had gone down and one of his brothers in arms had been killed, he wrote it beside their headshot. One by one, he carried their memory forward.
That is what Memorial Day is truly about.
Not just history books or ceremonies, but names, faces, friendships, sacrifice, and the lives forever changed by loss.
Today, we remember them.
And we remember the families who still carry that grief generations later.
Lest we forget.
HonorTheFallen
